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The speaker wore his usual uniform of a faded black Timberland sweatshirt and jeans; his London audience was all tailored suits and double-cuffed shirts. But as James Montier finished explaining why money shouldn't be equated with happiness, the equity and bond traders rose to their feet in applause.
"I don't think they heard much beyond rule 3," Montier quipped afterward. Rule 3 of his 10 for achieving sustainable happiness is, "Have sex."
Montier is an economist and global equity strategist at Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein, a German-owned investment bank. But rather than dwell in analyses of emerging markets and asset allocation, this 34-year-old maverick lectures London's big money traders and fund managers on spending their bonuses scuba diving or walking Peru's Machu Picchu instead of buying a Ferrari.
In fact, Montier flirts regularly with financial heresy. In one of his 40 research notes last year, he argued that investors with more data are not necessarily better off--we have only so much capacity to process information. In another, he claimed that analysts shouldn't bother meeting with execs at the companies they cover since analysts only ask questions that encourage the answers they want to hear.
After studying traditional economics, Montier took banking jobs in London, Tokyo, and Hong Kong. He began mining behavioral economics--then an emerging discipline at the nexus of economics and psychology--to explain investors' irrational behavior during the dotcom boom. He became intrigued by the role of human emotions in markets where prices were moved as much by psychological factors as by earnings reports.
You'll find the full story in the following link to Fast Company
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