The Hour Between Dog and Wolf: Risk-Taking, Gut Feelings and the Biology of Boom and Bust. John Coates

Paperback. Pub Date :2013-01-31 Pages: 304 Language: English Publisher: Fourth Estate Now shortlisted for the 2012 Financial Times Business Book of the Year Award and the Wellcome Trust Book Prize. The Hour Between Dog and Wolf is a resonant exploration of economic behaviour and its consequences.Now shortlisted for the In this startling and unconventional book neuroscientist and former Wall Street trader John Coates shows us the bankers in their natural environment. He reveals how their biochemistry has a lasting and significant impact on our economy. We learn how risk stimulates the most primitive part of the bankers brain and how making the deals our bank balances depend on provokes an overwhelming fight-or-flight response. Constant swinging between aggression and apprehension impairs their judgment. causing economic upheaval in the wider world. The transformation between ...

Business & Money

JOHN COATES

Management & Leadership

Fourth Estate Ltd.

The Hour Between Dog and Wolf by John Coates

Art of Nick Cardy

Arts & Photography

History & Criticism

COATS PUBLISHING, INC.

A successful Wall Street trader turned Cambridge neuroscientist reveals the biology of boom and bust and how risk taking transforms our body chemistry, driving us to extremes of euphoria and risky behavior or stress and depression.  The laws of financial boom and bust, it turns out, have more than a little to do with male hormones. In a series of groundbreaking experiments, Dr. John Coates identified a feedback loop between testosterone and success that dramatically lowers the fear of risk in men -- especially younger men. Significantly, the fear of risk is not reduced in women. Similarly, intense failure leads to a rise in levels of cortisol, the antitestosterone hormone, which lowers the appetite for risk across an entire spectrum of decisions.  Coates had set out to prove a strong intuition from his previous career: Before he became a world-class neuroscientist, Coates ran a derivatives desk in New York. As a successful trader on Wall Street, ''the hour between dog and wolf'' was the moment traders transformed -- they would become revved up, exuberant risk takers when flying high or tentative, risk-averse creatures when cowering from their losses. Coates understood instinctively that these dispositions were driven by body chemistry -- and then he proved it.  The Hour between Dog and Wolf expands on Coates' own research to offer lessons from the entire exploding new field of the biology of risk. Risk concentrates the mind and body like nothing else, altering our physiology in ways that have profound and lasting effects. What's more, biology shifts investors' risk preferences across the business cycle and can precipitate great change in the marketplace.  Though Coates' research concentrates on traders, his conclusions shed light on all types of high-pressure decision making, from the sports field to the battlefield. This book leaves us with a powerful insight: handling risk in a ''highly evolved'' way isn't a matter of mind over body; it's a matter of mind and body working together. We all have it in us to be transformed from dog into wolf; the only question is whether we can understand the causes and the consequences.

The Hour Between Dog and Wolf: Risk Taking, Gut Feelings, and the Biology of Boom and Bust

Finance

Blackstone Publishing

How risk taking transforms our body chemistry, driving us to extremes of euphoria and risky behavior-or stress and depression In this eye-opening book, Coates-a former Wall Street trader and now a world-class neuroscientist-describes the role our biology plays in our risk-taking behavior. Coates brings his research to life by telling a story of fictional traders who get caught up in a bubble and then a crash. As these traders place their bets and live with the results, Coates looks inside their bodies to describe the physiology driving them into irrational exuberance and then pessimism. The result is a riveting tale and a penetrating insight into how traders'-and indeed all humans'-bodies guide their risk taking, endowing them with fast reactions and gut feelings; but how their biology can also lead them to extremes of euphoria or anxiety and stress, thereby wreaking havoc on the economy. Coates extends his conclusions to all types of high-pressure decision making-from the sports field to the battlefield.

Blackstone Pub

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