The Seven Virtues of Great Investors

Most investors try to control the wrong things. Popular financial columnist for The Wall Street Journal Jason Zweig shows the essential strengths that the best investors share, and teaches you how to cultivate these in yourself to master the market.

Open any investing book, tune in to financial television, watch any TikTok “finfluencer,” and you’ll immediately learn a lie. Investing, you’ll be told, 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 and beautifully illustrated book, Wall Street Journal financial columnist Jason Zweig shows what it really takes to be a great investor: the right temperament. The best investors share a few essential strengths, or what Zweig calls the seven virtues:

• Curiosity, the intrinsic drive to learn and understand more about the world around you.
• Skepticism, refusing to accept financial orthodoxy or to believe in anything without evaluating the evidence.
• Discipline, using consistent rules to structure your decisions and measuring the results over time.
• Independence, thinking for yourself and assessing your performance by your own standards.
• Patience, realizing that investing success is determined over the course of decades, not milliseconds.
• Courage, being able to endure the worst market swings and being willing to do the opposite of what feels easy.
• Humility, learning to be honest about your skills, your limitations, and the power of luck.

Zweig provides the very best advice from exclusive interviews with top investors like Warren Buffett, Charlie Munger, and John C. Bogle, adding new layers of insight from financial history, from behavioral finance and neuroeconomics, and from Wall Street Journal readers themselves, who have shared with him how they’ve applied these virtues to achieve successful returns.

Meticulously researched and gracefully written, summing up all Zweig has learned in his decades of covering financial markets, The Seven Virtues of Great Investors is an original and essential read for any individual or professional who wants to become better at investing. Along the way, cultivating the virtues that will make you a better investor just might help you become a better person, too.