Summer Reading

Emotional Investment

Would you buy your mom a rose for Mother’s Day or give her $10? Both cost the same—but c’mon, go with the rose! What does this have to do with finance? Plenty, says Meir Statman, the Glenn Klimek Professor of Finance. “Stocks, bonds, and all other financial products and services are like roses, watches, cars, and restaurant meals, all providing utilitarian, expressive, and emotional benefits.”

Investment decisions, like everyday decisions, should be made with emotional and utilization benefits in mind. But normal people are not simply rational. In Finance for Normal People: How Investors and Markets Behave (Oxford University Press), Statman starts with this truth and helps people harness it.

Photo courtesy Oxford University Press

“It is models that must conform to people, not the other way around,” Statman says. “Normal people are more complex than rational ones, yet normal people are who we are.”

Epic Reading

The Village of Morville started taking shape in Matthew Jobin’s head around age 14. Now he is an adjunct lecturer in anthropology. But he grew up in Canada, around creeks and rivers. He was fascinated by history—especially medieval. Soon his surroundings and interests merged. “I realized I not only had a world that I loved—but one I could put under threat,” Jobin says.

In The Skeleth, the second book of his Nethergrim epic, readers follow Edmund, Katherine, and Tom as they combat the Nethergrim and a new foe, the Skeleth— an energy force that can control minds and bodies. Kirkus Reviews calls it “a solid contender for the teen answer to Game of Thrones.” The third and final book in the saga is already scheduled to be published. Jobin calls it a final showdown with the Nethergrim. “It’s a bit broader in scope,” he says, “the largest of the three books.”