Date: Monday 26 October 2026 Time: 6.30-7.30pm GMT
Venue: Old Theatre, Old Building, LSE (map)
Speaker: Alex Edmans (London Business School)
Chair: Cameron Peng (LSE Finance & Financial Markets Group)
Even the smartest investors lose their minds – and their money.
Why do investors chase AI stocks that bleed losses? Why do they ignore glaring opportunities hiding in plain sight? Why does the stock market fall after a football defeat, or rise on a sunny day?
In this talk, based on a brand-new book, Professor Alex Edmans reveals how mood, emotion and social contagion lead even seasoned professionals to make irrational decisions.
But their mistakes can become your advantage. Edmans uncovers how you can protect yourself from costly mishaps and capitalise when others misstep. You’ll learn how to think sharper, invest smarter and recognise when the crowd has lost the plot. Drawing on surprising academic research and practical insights, this is a compelling guide to beating the market in a world that thinks fast, loud and wrong.
Event hashtag: #LSEMadnessOfMarkets
Biographies
Alex Edmans is Professor of Finance at London Business School. Alex has a PhD from MIT as a Fulbright Scholar, and was previously a tenured professor at Wharton and an investment banker at Morgan Stanley. Alex has spoken at the World Economic Forum in Davos, testified in the UK Parliament, and given TED/TEDx talks with a combined 3 million views. He serves as non-executive director of the Investor Forum, on Morgan Stanley’s Institute for Sustainable Investing Advisory Board, and on Royal London Asset Management’s Responsible Investment Advisory Committee. He is a Fellow of the British Academy, Academy of Social Sciences, and the CFA Society of the UK.
Alex is the author of Grow the Pie: How Great Companies Deliver Both Purpose and Profit, May Contain Lies: How Stories, Statistics, and Studies Exploit Our Biases – And What We Can Do About It, and Principles of Corporate Finance (with Brealey, Myers, and Allen). He has won 31 teaching awards and was named Professor of the Year by Poets & Quants in 2021.
Cameron Peng is an Assistant Professor of Finance at the London School of Economics and Political Science and a Research Affiliate at the Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR). At LSE, he is Programme Director of Capital Markets at the Financial Markets Group (FMG) and a member of the Paul Woolley Centre. His research focuses on behavioral economics, behavioral finance, household finance, and empirical asset pricing. He has published in leading economics and finance journals, including Econometrica, Quarterly Journal of Economics, Review of Financial Studies, and the Journal of Financial Economics. He holds a B.A. in Finance from Peking University and a Ph.D. in Financial Economics from Yale University.
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