How Do You Know?: A Guide to Clear Thinking About Wall Street, Investing & Life

by Christopher W. Mayer

How should you approach your investments? How should you think about them? Those are the types of questions Chris Mayer tackles in his newest book, How Do You A Guide to Clear Thinking About Wall Street, Investing, & Life. Through a series of provocative—and often amusing—examples, Chris puts those perennial investing questions into a much larger context… How do you know anything at all? His answer, which is sure to make many readers uncomfortable is… you don’t. How Do You Know? is not another book on investing. It is full of ideas about investing, including one that hasn’t been part of the public investing discussion in nearly 60 years. But Chris’ goal is not just to give you ideas, but to provide practical guidelines for uncluttering your thinking—that is, for getting unhelpful ideas and misleading information out of the way.

Genres: Business, Finance

240 pages, Paperback

Published February 23, 2018

Reviews

[Dom Young · Rating 4 out of 5]

4 ⭐️

[Jon Angell · Rating 3 out of 5]

I have followed the author Chris Mayer as a stock analyst for several years now. I have enjoyed his other books. This one was a much harder to get into but valuable in the ideas presented. This was my first introduction to the field of "general semantics." The book was filled with challenges to beliefs and the theories of cause and effect and many other things... it challenges the reader to question, "How do you know?" and suggests that you ask this, and ask it often.

Four take aways:
1) our world changes continuously, nothing stays the same
2) No two things exist exactly alike
3) observer and observed create what the observer sees
4) we can never know all the details; we always leave things out

Think of the saying:
"The map is not the territory." Alfred Korzybski (1879-1950)

In the end this book is about thoughts and tools to improve your thinking. If you want to be a master thinker.... this may be the book you are looking for. May be too advanced and purely aspiration for me to try and grasp.

[Samuel · Rating 1 out of 5]

Tostonazo máximo. No he logrado pasar del 15%

[Mark · Rating 3 out of 5]

I give Mayer a lot of credit for his work in bridging dry academia-adjacent theories and concepts with the world of stockpicking. His gentle writing style and curious mind are suited for it. However, this comes up short.

The biggest struggle here is that General Semantics, which most of the content is drawn from, is just a rehash of many older ideas from Kantian philosophy and cognitive psychology. In fact, Mayer seems to mostly lean on derivative thinkers like Alan Watts, Robert Anton Wilson, etc. without spending any time engaging with anything technical. For someone who takes the time to brag about the size of his bookshelf, I have to ding him for his unwillingness to engage with the literature.

The result is as expected. The applications of General Semantics to investing feel hollow and without impact. The main takeaway is that we need to dig deep into a stock's inner workings to really understand it, going beyond labels like sectors, ratios, etc.

Most investors are well aware of that.

3 stars because I like Chris Mayer and appreciate the attempt at something new.

[Maria Siay · Rating 5 out of 5]

Te guste o no invertir leer a este hombre es una puñetera pasada en todos los sentidos