The 7 Virtues of Great Investors
Synopsis
Most investors try to control the wrong things. Popular Wall Street Journal financial columnist Jason Zweig shows the essential strengths that the best investors share—and teaches you how to cultivate them in yourself to beat the market.
Open any investing book, tune in to financial television, or watch any TikTok “finfluencer,” and you’ll immediately hear the same lie: investing is a struggle against the markets, and it’s a struggle you can and must win.
Forget that.
These aren’t the people you have to beat in order to succeed as an investor. Instead, you need to outsmart an even more powerful adversary: yourself.
In this illuminating book, Jason Zweig shows what it really takes to be a great investor: the right temperament. The best investors share a few essential strengths—the seven virtues:
- Curiosity — the intrinsic drive to learn and understand more about the world around you.
- Skepticism — the refusal to accept financial orthodoxy or believe anything without evaluating the evidence.
- Discipline — using consistent rules to structure decisions and measuring results over time.
- Independence — thinking for yourself and assessing your performance by your own standards.
- Patience — realizing that investing success is determined over decades, not milliseconds.
- Courage — enduring the worst market swings and being willing to do the opposite of what feels easy.
- Humility — being honest about your skills, your limitations, and the power of luck.
Zweig draws on the wisdom of legendary investors including Warren Buffett, Charlie Munger, John C. Bogle, and Benjamin Graham, while incorporating insights from financial history, behavioral finance, neuroeconomics, and Wall Street Journal readers who have successfully applied these virtues in their own investing lives.
The Seven Virtues of Great Investors is for anyone who wants to become better at investing. Along the way, cultivating the virtues that make you a better investor just might help you become a better person, too.
Details
About the author
Jason Zweig has been an award-winning financial columnist for The Wall Street Journal since 2008. He is the editor of the revised edition of Benjamin Graham’s The Intelligent Investor, the classic text Warren Buffett has described as “by far the best book about investing ever written.” Zweig is also the author of Your Money and Your Brain, The Devil’s Financial Dictionary, and The 7 Virtues of of Great Investors. Before joining the WSJ, he was a senior writer for Money magazine, a guest columnist for Time magazine and CNN, and the mutual funds editor at Forbes.
A graduate of Columbia College, where he received a John Jay National Scholarship, Zweig is a frequent television and radio commentator and popular public speaker. He has addressed audiences at the Aspen Institute, CFA Institute, Morningstar Investment Conference, and universities including Harvard, Stanford, and Oxford. He also served for many years as a trustee of the Museum of American Finance, an affiliate of the Smithsonian Institution, and serves on the editorial boards of Financial History magazine and The Journal of Behavioral Finance.
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