More on Meir Statman and his book 

Meir Stman’s book, What Investors Really Want, is published by McGraw Hill. Its sub-title is Learn the lessons of behavioral finance. Meir’s research on behavioral finance is long standing and deep. It has been supported by the National Science Foundation, CFA Institute, and Investment Management Consultants Association (IMCA) and has been published in the Journal of Finance, Financial Analysts Journal, Journal of Portfolio Management, and many other publications. A recipient of two IMCA Journal Awards, the Moskowitz Prize for Best Paper on Socially Responsible Investing, and three Graham and Dodd Awards, Statman consults with many investment companies and presents his work to academics and professionals in the U.S. and abroad.

For more on Meir and his work, we invite you to visit his excellent blog created in connection with his book launch, or to watch the interview of Statman  by Eric Shurenberg on the following recent CBSMarketWatch.com video.  Stateman has written extensively on diversification and related subjects; see for example, his 2008 text on the subject co-authored with Jonathan Scheid or as a PDF doc.1882.

And now we turn our site over to Meir to discuss index investing, a subject of common interest to our site and to his book. Do you recognize yourself in his comparison of passive and active investors? For those of you who find the discussion interesting (we certainly did), we encourage you to consider purchasing the book (full disclosure: we were provided with a courtesy copy of the book).