Alex Edmans - The Madness of Markets

This week on Standard Deviations with Dr. Daniel Crosby, Dr. Crosby is joined by Alex Edmans. Alex Edmans is Professor of Finance at London Business School, specialising in corporate finance, responsible business, sustainable investing and behavioral finance. Alex is the author of Grow the Pie: How Great Companies Deliver Both Purpose and Profit (a Financial Times Book of the Year for 2020), May Contain Lies: How Stories, Statistics, and Studies Exploit Our Biases – And What We Can Do About It, and the classic finance textbook Principles of Corporate Finance (with Brealey, Myers, and Allen). His latest book, The Madness of Markets: How Smart Investors Make Crazy Decisions – And How to Exploit Them, will be published by Penguin Random House in September 2026. He has written for the Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, The Economist (“By Invitation”), Harvard Business Review and World Economic Forum and been interviewed by Bloomberg, BBC, CNBC, CNN, ESPN, Fox, ITV, NPR, Reuters, Sky News and Sky Sports. Alex has won 30 teaching awards and was named Professor of the Year by Poets & Quants in 2021. He previously served as Mercers' School Memorial Professor of Business at Gresham College, delivering a four-year programme of public lectures covering The Principles of Finance, The Psychology of Finance, Business Skills for the 21st Century and How Business Can Better Serve Society. Alex graduated from Oxford University, worked at Morgan Stanley in investment banking and fixed income sales and trading and completed a PhD at MIT Sloan as a Fulbright Scholar. He joined Wharton in 2007, was tenured in 2013 and subsequently moved to London Business School. He is a Fellow of the British Academy, a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences and a Fellow of the CFA Society of the UK.