Adaptive Markets

A very interesting and insightful book to read.. The author tries to set up a theory which overturns the classical efficient market theory by evidence based analysis, especially in the area of biopsychology and neroeconomics, etc. It goes throught the history of EMH and explains why those financial crisis do not follow it. A few insteresting parts are: vivid examples or experiments on how environment change people's optimal decision; people are not rational due to the environment and some biological reason (MRI on brains, which parts of the brain controls emotion, logics, etc and how they connect to economics decision); intelligence is narrative (can't agree more..); the concept of evolution at speed of thoughts; how they analyze a few financial crisis by computer simulated ways (good to know the background and the reasons caused the crisis (at least from their perspective)).

This is definitely a good book to refresh some of the fundamental knowledge in economics/finance, and get to know the "new" area of behavioral finance / nero economics / etc. More importantly, understands how to explain the "unusual" behaviors under financial market over different time horizon.

The author seems to illustrate how finance evolution would eventually "solve" a lot of problems in the world in the later part of the book, which like others said seems to digress to the subject. i guess readers are waiting for more application of his adaptive market theory in the market. however again, one should not expect too much from a book which tries to set up a theory at high level... because after all, even if all people understand the adaptive market, there is still competition (means need to be "smarter" than others), the financial market doesn't not have law in other hard science or nature. perhaps the useful take away is to start think in this direction and apply it as early as possible and keep being adaptive.