Tuesday, June 01, 2010

Extraordinary Popular Delusions

Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds by Charles Mackey is considered must-reading by many investment professionals. The material is classic, but I found the writing archaic and the reading of it sometimes ponderous. (After all, it was written in 1841.) The book is available for free on the internet, for example at


I found Richard Band's summary of the pertinent sections of the book much more readable (and shorter). That summary is found in Chapter 2 of his book Contrary Investing. It's out of print but you can get it cheap used at Amazon.

[via value_investment_thoughts 7/31/05 (that long ago?) since I'm considering swapping my mostly unread copy at paperbackswap]

Hmmm.. that link no longer works (though it's sort of still at archive.org). Try this one (linked from wikipedia)

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