Successful investing isn’t about controlling the markets. It’s about controlling yourself: your information, your emotions, and your actions.
In The Seven Virtues of Great Investors, Jason Zweig distills everything he has learned in decades of studying and interviewing the world’s best investors, including Warren Buffett, Benjamin Graham, Charlie Munger, and Sir John Templeton. It also features practical insights from “ordinary” investors who have achieved extraordinary results by cultivating the investing virtues.
The seven virtues of great investors are:
* curiosity, the intrinsic drive to learn and understand more about the world around you;
* skepticism, the refusal to believe in the conventional financial wisdom without evaluating the evidence;
* discipline, using consistent rules to structure your decisions and measure the results over time;
* independence, thinking for yourself and assessing your performance by your own standards;
* patience, realizing that investing success is determined over the course of decades, not days or milliseconds;
* courage, being able to endure the worst market swings and being willing to do the opposite of what feels easy; and
* humility, learning to be honest about your skills, your limitations, and the power of luck.
Praise & Review
Chock-full of history and ravishing art, The Seven Virtues of Great Investors is long on something that’s often in short supply in the investing world: real wisdom. It’s destined to be a classic—essential reading for novice and seasoned investors alike.
— Christine Benz, director of personal finance and retirement planning for Morningstar and author of How to Retire
Few writers in our lifetimes have offered the wisdom, expertise, and crisp prose of Jason Zweig. This book could be called The 7 Virtues of Great People, but as he does so well, Jason shows that what makes a great investor is less about what you know and more about who you are.
— Morgan Housel, author of The Psychology of Money
Jason Zweig knows your financial demons and how to vanquish them. The 7 Virtues of Great Investors distills his three decades at the pinnacle of financial journalism into the best guide I’ve seen for doing so. Read and enjoy: Your future self and your heirs will thank you.”
–William J. Bernstein, author of The Four Pillars of Investing
Zweig has created the perfect framework for investors. This book shifts the focus from stock prices, earnings, Fed actions, war, inflation, P/E ratios, geopolitics, moving averages, tariffs, bond yields, media noise, and elections to the one thing investors can actually control: their own behavior. Jason has created the best antidote for what ails the FOMO generation.
— Barry Ritholtz, Founder & CIO, Ritholtz Wealth Management