An insight into the secretive 'matchstick men' painter

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m002rxvm?at_mid=wWtQvZdmNp&at_campaign=L_S_Lowry_The_Unheard_Tapes&at_medium=display_ad&at_campaign_type=owned&at_nation=NET&at_audience_id=SS&at_product=iplayer&at_brand=m002rxvm&at_ptr_name=bbc&at_ptr_type=media&at_format=image&at_objective=consumption&at_link_title=L_S_Lowry_The_Unheard_Tapes&at_bbc_team=BBC

#Art #Biography #History

The Many Love Lives of Ted Turner

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/08/style/ted-turner-relationships-wives-jane-fonda.html

#Relationships #Biography #News

@standardebooks is in the final day of their #fundraising campaign to be awarded a $1000 grant from Fractured Atlas.

Standard Ebooks provides high quality typeset editions of #publicdomain books. These books are hand #edited and sourced from multiple editions of the original work.  Currently, their catalog contains over 1,900 works, all freely available from their website.  All of their works are available in ePub, azw3, kepbub and xhtml formats.

For every #donation made during this campaign, Standard Ebooks earns another entry into the Fractured Atlas Spring Match campaign.

If you care about #ebooks, the #publicdomain, #reading or #literacy please #donate today. Even a small one-time donation will earn Standard Ebooks another entry into the Fractured Atlas Spring Match drawing.

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Main Standard Ebooks website: https://standardebooks.org/

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Lesen über Van Gogh

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#biografie
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#vangogh

Who Is Burton Malkiel?

Burton Malkiel is one of the most consequential figures in the history of American investing, not because he managed a famous fund or built a financial empire, but because he wrote a book that changed how millions of ordinary people think about the stock market. His argument, that most investors would be better served by buying a low-cost index fund than by trying to pick winning stocks or hire active managers to do it for them, was considered controversial when he first made it in 1973. Decades of evidence have since proven him right, and the index fund revolution that now moves trillions of dollars has his intellectual fingerprints all over it.

Early Life and Education

Burton Gordon Malkiel was born on August 28, 1932, in Boston, Massachusetts. He grew up during the Great Depression and World War II, a formative backdrop for anyone who would spend their career thinking seriously about risk, markets, and the limits of human prediction.

He earned his bachelor’s degree from Harvard College in 1953 and went on to complete his MBA and PhD in economics from Princeton University. Princeton would become the central institution of his academic life, and he would return there as a professor and eventually as the Chemical Bank Chairman’s Professor of Economics, a position he held for decades before being named professor emeritus.

Career in Academia and Finance

Malkiel’s career has always operated on two tracks simultaneously: rigorous academic economics and practical engagement with the financial world. That combination, the willingness to bring serious research to bear on questions that actually matter to ordinary investors, is what distinguishes his work from most academic economics.

He served as a member of the President’s Council of Economic Advisers under President Gerald Ford from 1975 to 1977, bringing his perspective on markets and monetary policy directly into the policy arena. He served as dean of the Yale School of Management from 1981 to 1988, one of the most prominent business school leadership roles in the country. He also served on the board of directors of several major corporations and financial institutions, including Vanguard, the index fund company whose philosophy aligns most closely with the investment approach Malkiel has spent his career advocating.

His association with Vanguard is particularly significant. John Bogle, the founder of Vanguard and the creator of the first index mutual fund available to individual investors, and Malkiel were intellectual allies whose work reinforced each other. Bogle built the institutional apparatus to make low-cost index investing accessible to ordinary Americans. Malkiel provided much of the theoretical and empirical foundation that explained why it worked.

Later in his career Malkiel also served as chief investment officer of Wealthfront, a robo-advisory firm, demonstrating a genuine commitment to applying his investment principles in modern technological contexts rather than simply theorizing about them from a distance.

A Random Walk Down Wall Street

Malkiel’s most important and most widely read work is A Random Walk Down Wall Street, first published in 1973 and now in its thirteenth edition. It is one of the few investment books that can genuinely claim to have changed the world in a measurable way, and it remains as relevant today as it was when it first appeared.

The title comes from the random walk hypothesis, a concept from mathematics describing a path in which each step is independent of the ones before it. Applied to financial markets, the hypothesis holds that stock prices incorporate all available information so rapidly and so completely that future price movements cannot be reliably predicted from past ones. If that is true, and Malkiel argues at length that it largely is, then the entire enterprise of stock picking and market timing is a losing game after costs.

The book covers a sweep of financial history including some of the most famous speculative manias on record, from the Dutch tulip bulb craze of the seventeenth century to the dot-com bubble, making the case that intelligent people have always been capable of convincing themselves that this time is different. It explains the theoretical underpinnings of market efficiency, evaluates the evidence for and against both technical and fundamental analysis, and arrives at a practical conclusion that remains the book’s most lasting contribution: most investors should buy and hold a diversified, low-cost index fund and ignore the noise.

Over its fifty-plus year publishing history, A Random Walk Down Wall Street has been updated through multiple market cycles including the 1987 crash, the dot-com collapse, the 2008 financial crisis, and the COVID-19 market disruption. In each case the evidence has reinforced rather than undermined the book’s central argument.

Buy A Random Walk Down Wall Street on Amazon

Investment Philosophy

Malkiel’s investment philosophy can be summarized in a handful of principles that he has articulated consistently across decades of writing, teaching, and public commentary.

The first is that markets are largely efficient. Not perfectly efficient, not efficient in every corner at every moment, but efficient enough that the average investor cannot expect to consistently identify and profit from mispriced securities after accounting for the costs of attempting to do so. This is not a statement about market perfection. It is a practical observation about the extraordinary difficulty of beating a market composed of millions of sophisticated participants all trying to do the same thing.

The second is that investment costs matter enormously over long periods. The difference between a fund that charges one percent annually and one that charges a tenth of a percent looks trivial in any given year. Compounded over thirty years of saving and investing, it translates into a substantial reduction in ending wealth. Minimizing fees is one of the few investment decisions that reliably and predictably improves long-term outcomes.

The third is that diversification reduces risk without necessarily reducing returns. Holding a broadly diversified portfolio, across asset classes, geographies, and sectors, smooths out the volatility associated with any individual holding without giving up the long-term growth that equity markets have historically provided.

The fourth is that most investors should keep their strategy simple. Regular contributions to a low-cost index fund, maintained through market cycles without constant adjustments in response to short-term news or performance, is not a concession to mediocrity. It is the approach that the evidence most consistently supports.

Influence and Legacy

The practical influence of Malkiel’s work is difficult to overstate. The index fund industry, which now accounts for the majority of assets in American equity mutual funds, rests in significant part on the intellectual foundation that A Random Walk Down Wall Street helped establish. The tens of millions of Americans who invest through low-cost index funds in their 401k plans and IRAs are, in a meaningful sense, beneficiaries of his arguments.

His work has influenced generations of economists, financial journalists, and investment professionals. It is regularly assigned in university finance courses and remains a standard reference for anyone trying to understand why passive investing has so thoroughly outperformed the active management industry over long periods.

Beyond the index fund argument, Malkiel’s contribution to financial literacy more broadly has been substantial. He has spent fifty years explaining difficult ideas in accessible language, engaging with evidence honestly, and maintaining intellectual consistency even when the consensus view ran against him. That combination of rigor and accessibility is rarer in financial writing than it should be.

Other Written Work

Beyond A Random Walk Down Wall Street, Malkiel has authored several other books worth noting. The Inflation Beater’s Investment Guide, published in 1980, addressed investment strategy during the high-inflation environment of that era. Global Bargain Hunting, co-authored with J.P. Morgan, examined international investing opportunities in emerging markets. The Elements of Investing, co-authored with Charles Ellis and published in 2009, distills the case for simple, low-cost, long-term investing into an accessible and concise format that is particularly useful for readers who want the essential argument without the full apparatus of A Random Walk Down Wall Street.

Where to Start

For readers new to Malkiel’s work, A Random Walk Down Wall Street is the natural starting point, and the most current edition is the right one to buy since each revision updates the evidence and engages with new market developments. The core argument has not changed across editions because the evidence supporting it has continued to accumulate, but the later editions are more comprehensive and more current in their examples.

The Elements of Investing, co-authored with Charles Ellis, whose own book Winning the Loser’s Game is reviewed on this site, is a useful companion for readers who want a shorter and more distilled version of the same principles.

Malkiel’s work pairs naturally with The Little Book of Common Sense Investing by John Bogle and Stay the Course, also by Bogle, both reviewed on this site. Together these books make the most comprehensive and most rigorously argued case for low-cost, broadly diversified, long-term index fund investing available in the accessible investment literature.

🐢🧬 Researchers estimate that reaching age 90 is roughly 30% #genetics and 70% #health behaviors. They explain how an active lifestyle and a passion for the natural world can influence long term health and cognitive function.

👉 https://www.sciencealert.com/sir-david-attenborough-is-turning-100-this-could-be-the-secret-of-his-longevity

#davidattenborough #science #biology #nature #history #environment #biography

Today is 167 years since the death of #AlexanderVonHumboldt. This admirably concise biography offers a factual and nuanced picture of his life and work, and critically interrogates previous portrayals.

https://inquisitivebiologist.com/2025/02/11/book-review-alexander-von-humboldt-a-concise-biography/

#Books #BookReview #Bookstodon #Biography #HistoryOfScience #ScienceHistory #HistSci #Scicomm @princetonupress @princetonnature

Kinda wish I'd read this when it felt less timely

#books #reading #biography #Nazism #history

Who Is James Montier?

In a financial industry that rewards confidence, consensus, and the appearance of certainty, James Montier has spent his career doing something considerably less comfortable: telling investors, including professional ones, that most of what they believe about their own abilities is wrong. He is a behavioral finance researcher, strategist, and author whose work sits at the intersection of academic psychology, neuroscience, and practical investment management. For anyone trying to understand why smart people make bad financial decisions, and what to do about it, Montier is one of the most important voices in the field.

Early Life and Education

James Montier was born and raised in the United Kingdom. He studied economics at the University of Durham and went on to earn a master’s degree from the University of Exeter. His academic background is in economics rather than psychology, but his intellectual interests pulled consistently toward the behavioral side of financial decision-making at a time when that field was still considered somewhat outside the mainstream of serious investment research.

His entry into the professional world coincided with a period of growing institutional interest in behavioral finance following the foundational work of Daniel Kahneman, Amos Tversky, and Richard Thaler, whose research was beginning to attract serious attention in investment circles. Montier recognized earlier than most practitioners that the implications of behavioral research for investment management were not merely academic but deeply practical, and he built his career around making those implications accessible and actionable for working investors.

Career in Investment Research

Montier built his professional reputation as a global equity strategist, first at Dresdner Kleinwort and later at Société Générale, the French multinational investment bank. At both institutions his research reports attracted a devoted following among institutional investors, portfolio managers, and financial academics who found his combination of rigorous behavioral science and practical investment application unusually valuable.

His research notes at Société Générale in particular became some of the most widely circulated documents in professional investment circles during the mid-2000s. They were distinctive in several ways: they engaged seriously with academic research rather than simply citing it superficially, they were willing to reach conclusions that contradicted the prevailing consensus, and they were written with unusual clarity and directness for a genre that often prioritizes the appearance of sophistication over genuine communication. Investors who read his work regularly described it as genuinely changing how they thought about decision-making and market behavior.

In 2009 Montier joined GMO, the Boston-based investment management firm founded by Jeremy Grantham. GMO is known in the investment world for its long-term value orientation, its rigorous approach to asset allocation, and its willingness to take contrarian positions that diverge significantly from market consensus when its analysis suggests the consensus is wrong. It is an institution whose intellectual culture fits naturally with Montier’s own disposition toward evidence-based thinking and skepticism of popular narratives, and he has remained there as a member of the asset allocation team.

Books and Written Work

Montier has written several books on behavioral finance and investment management, ranging from technical academic texts to accessible popular works. His two most widely read titles are The Little Book of Behavioral Finance and The Little Book of Behavioral Investing, both published in 2010 as part of Wiley’s Little Book series and both reviewed on this site.

The Little Book of Behavioral Finance provides a broad introduction to the major cognitive biases that lead investors astray, drawing on decades of academic research to explain the mechanisms behind overconfidence, herding, loss aversion, and related phenomena. It is written for a general audience and remains one of the most accessible entry points into behavioral finance available.

The Little Book of Behavioral Investing, subtitled How Not to Be Your Own Worst Enemy, covers overlapping territory with a more specific focus on how these biases manifest in actual investment decisions and what structural changes to investment process can mitigate their influence. Together the two books form an unusually coherent and practically useful guide to the psychological dimension of investing.

His longer and more technically demanding work, Behavioural Investing: A Practitioner’s Guide to Applying Behavioural Finance, published in 2007, is aimed at professional investors and covers the same territory with considerably greater depth and more specific application to portfolio construction and investment process design. It is widely used in professional investment management settings and has influenced how a generation of portfolio managers think about decision-making and risk.

He has also published extensively through GMO’s research platform, producing white papers and client letters on topics ranging from valuation and asset allocation to the limits of quantitative investing and the behavioral foundations of market cycles. These publications are available through GMO’s website and have reached a wide audience within the investment profession.

Buy Your Money and Your Brain on Amazon

Core Ideas and Intellectual Contributions

Montier’s most important intellectual contribution is his sustained and rigorous application of behavioral science to investment practice. While behavioral finance as an academic discipline was well-established by the time he became prominent, the translation of that research into practical guidance for working investors was less developed, and Montier was among the first practitioners to do that translation work seriously and at scale.

His treatment of overconfidence is particularly important and particularly well-documented. The research he reviews consistently shows that professional investors, including highly educated and extensively experienced ones, systematically overestimate the accuracy of their own predictions and the quality of their own judgment. Forecasters who express ninety percent confidence in their predictions are right substantially less than ninety percent of the time. Analysts who construct detailed valuation models produce estimates with far wider error bands than their stated confidence levels imply. Montier does not present this as a character flaw or an intelligence failure. He presents it as a feature of human cognition that is shared universally and that requires structural solutions rather than simply greater effort or greater self-awareness.

His work on the value of systematic, rules-based investment processes as a defense against behavioral biases connects directly to the broader case for passive, low-cost, broadly diversified investing. If the primary source of investment underperformance is not insufficient analysis but the behavioral errors that accompany active decision-making, then strategies that minimize the number and frequency of active decisions are not just philosophically sound but specifically designed to address the actual mechanism of failure. This argument, which Montier develops with considerable supporting evidence, provides a behavioral foundation for the index fund investing philosophy advocated by figures like John Bogle and Burton Malkiel.

His skepticism toward financial forecasting is another consistent thread running through his work. Montier has documented extensively the poor track record of market predictions, including predictions made by the most credentialed and well-resourced analysts in the profession, and he is unsparing in his conclusion that the confidence with which most market commentary is delivered is wildly disproportionate to the actual predictive accuracy of the people delivering it. This critique has made him a valuable counterweight to the financial media’s appetite for confident directional calls about where markets are headed.

Influence and Legacy

Montier’s influence is difficult to quantify precisely but is clearly significant within the investment profession. His research at Société Générale shaped how a generation of institutional investors thought about behavioral finance, and his books have introduced the field to thousands of individual investors who might not otherwise have encountered it.

His work at GMO has contributed to one of the more intellectually distinctive investment firms in the world, an institution that has consistently been willing to make unfashionable calls based on valuation analysis and long-term thinking rather than chasing near-term performance. That institutional commitment to evidence-based, behaviorally informed investing reflects the same principles that run through Montier’s written work.

For readers building a serious financial education, engaging with Montier’s books is a valuable and underutilized step. Most personal finance education focuses on the mechanics of saving, investing, and debt management. It rarely addresses the cognitive architecture that determines whether people can actually execute those mechanics consistently over time. Montier’s work fills that gap with more rigor and more depth than almost anything else available in the accessible investment literature.

Where to Start

For readers new to Montier’s work, The Little Book of Behavioral Investing is the most practical starting point. It is short, accessible, and focused on the specific investment behaviors that most reliably destroy returns. The Little Book of Behavioral Finance covers similar ground with a somewhat broader lens and is equally accessible.

Both books pair naturally with Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman which provides the most comprehensive account of the cognitive mechanisms underlying the biases Montier describes. A Random Walk Down Wall Street by Burton Malkiel provides the market efficiency framework that explains why those biases are so costly in investment contexts. And Thinking in Bets by Annie Duke addresses decision quality under uncertainty from a complementary angle.

Together these books form the core of a serious education in the psychology of financial decision-making, which is ultimately as important as any technical knowledge about investment products or strategies. Understanding why you make the decisions you make is the prerequisite for making better ones, and James Montier has done more than almost anyone to make that understanding accessible to working investors.

Buy The Little Book of Behavioral Investing on Amazon