The Great Mistakes of Investors: Lessons from decades of markets.

Lessons from decades of markets.

Fifteen chapters mapping the typology of errors that retail investors make consistently across cycles, drawn from documented historical episodes and the empirical research that has measured their consequences. The book covers the errors of timing (FOMO buying at peaks, panic selling at bottoms, performance chasing, market timing), the structural errors of portfolio construction (concentration in single positions, leverage and the wipeout, insufficient diversification, the cumulative impact of fees), the cognitive errors (forecasting hubris, narrative susceptibility, purchase price anchoring, confirmation bias in digital echo chambers), and the contextual errors (action bias, ignoring the cycle), with a final synthesis that integrates the typology and the defensive framework. Specific historical episodes examined include the 1929 crash, the 1968-1973 Nifty Fifty, the 1989 Japanese bubble, the 1998 LTCM collapse, the 2000-2002 dotcom bust, the 2008 financial crisis, the 2020 pandemic crash, and the 2021-2022 speculative excesses in SPACs, meme stocks, and cryptocurrencies. Written for the educated retail investor with some experience and willingness to be honest about his own patterns; oriented toward structural defenses rather than willpower-based interventions; inspired by Howard Marks, Charlie Munger, Daniel Kahneman, Robert Shiller, John Bogle, and Morgan Housel.