The Alchemy of Finance: Reading the Mind of the Market

George Soros is indeed an intelectual and this book is undoubtly in the "heavy weight" rank.
Curious, I seem to favour such books recently, in detriment of my reading goals, but I digress, this was worth it.

The book is a mix of a personal journal and a philosophical essay on the Theory of Reflexivity.
At the time the book was written, Soros's practical experience was mirroring the findings of Kahneman and Tversky on the irrational behavior and cognitive biases in decision-making. Later, these findings were taken from the individual level and applied collectively to explain market movements and forming of speculative bubbles.
It is very interesting to see how Soros concomitently reached the same conclusions as others have in the academic show more circle, but in his case, as a market participant, thus arriving at the same point from personal experience and heavily influenced by the works of Karl Popper.

The meat of the book is his personal experiment, where for a specific time-frame, he detailed and presented the thought-process of his decision making with practical examples.
This book is not for the faint-hearted and knowledge of financial instruments and macro-economy, together with other readings, such as the works of Karl Popper, are required to get the most out of this book.

In the end, Soros in his experiment, suffered from his own self-fulfilling prophecy, as a market participant he influenced the market, thus the market took that into consideration and adapted to eventually render Soros's predictions (some) irelevant.

Some will say folly, Kahneman will say hindsight bias, I say that Soros by eliciting his Reflexivity theory first, before the experiment, proved a point: that we can only look at the market as a historical process. show less

Although riddled with trite social commentary, Soro's concept of Reflexology in financial markets is fascinating and well developed in this book.

This book was ok, but got very boring in parts

Changed my view on supply and demand model.

Miro's review is on this page:

http://www1.dragonet.es/users/markbcki/soros.htm