The surge in bitcoin has attracted much interest. Over the last five years, it has soared from $US12 to over $US8000; this year it’s up 760%. Its enthusiasts see it as the currency of the future and increasingly as a way to instant riches with rapid price gains only reinforcing this view. An alternative view is that it is just another in a long string of bubbles in investment markets.

Nobel Economics Laureates Daniel Kahneman, Robert Shiller and Richard Thaler and many others shown that investors and hence investment markets can be far from rational and this along with crowd psychology can drive asset prices far from fundamentally justified levels. This note provides a refresher on the psychology of investing before returning to look at bitcoin. 

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