My guest today is Terry Burnham, an economist who studies the biological and evolutionary basis of human behavior. He has a Ph.D. in Business Economics from Harvard University, a Masters from the MIT Sloan School with a concentration in finance. Terry was a professor at the Harvard Kennedy School, the University of Michigan, and the Harvard Business School. His non-academic experiences include working briefly for Goldman, Sachs & Co., being the chief financial officer for Progenics Pharmaceuticals , a start-up biotechnology company, and being the director of portfolio management for Acadian Asset Management, a quantitative equity manager.

The topic is his book Mean Markets and Lizard Brains: How to Profit from the New Science of Irrationality.

In this episode of Trend Following Radio we discuss:

• Burnham removed $1 million from his Bank of America account and said “I don’t trust the banks”
• The two ways to think about risk
• Separating the ideas of luck and skill
• The lizard brain and how it relates back to our choices
• A story about interacting with Paul Tudor Jones
• Why markets have momentum
• The great driver of conformity
• Rationality and irrationality
• Captive chimps vs. chimps in the wild and the differences in behavior
• Predicting when the Fed will step in
• Thinking of the worst case scenario for equities and looking to Japan for an example
• Negative interest rates

Jump in!

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I’m MICHAEL COVEL, the host of TREND FOLLOWING RADIO, and I’m proud to have delivered 10+ million podcast listens since 2012. Investments, economics, psychology, politics, decision-making, human behavior, entrepreneurship and trend following are all passionately explored and debated on my show.

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