Author

Tim Richards

Tim Richards

Founder of The Psy-Fi Blog – Author – Behavioral Finance Analyst

Tim Richards is a leading voice in behavioral finance and the founder of The Psy-Fi Blog, which has evolved into psyfi money. His work brings academic research, market psychology and plain spoken analysis together to help readers understand how emotions, biases and human behaviour shape real world investment decisions.

Professional background

Tim’s professional career spans technology and academic psychology, a combination that gave him a unique, data informed approach to understanding financial behaviour. His long standing interest in markets led him to create The Psy-Fi Blog as a place to analyse investment outcomes through the lens of cognitive bias, emotions and decision making.

The blog built a loyal readership, attracting up to 25,000 monthly visitors, and became known for replacing speculation with evidence, humour and clear logical argument.

Books and publications

Tim is the author of several well regarded works on investor psychology and behavioural finance:

Investing Psychology: The Effects of Behavioral Finance on Investment Choice and Bias

Wiley, 2014
A comprehensive guide to recognising and reducing the behavioural biases that consistently lead investors to underperform. It examines instinctive decision making, emotional responses and systematic thinking errors that distort financial choices.

The Zeitgeist Investor: Unlocking the Mind of the Market

Endeavour Press, 2012
A concise analysis of how market cycles reflect collective sentiment as much as economic fundamentals. The book explores booms, busts and recurring psychological patterns that drive market behaviour.

Contributions to:

  • Breaking the Grip of Short-Termism (2013)

  • Human Capital Handbook (2013)

These publications examine financial culture, short-term incentives and the behavioural roots of instability in global markets following the 2008 crisis.

Media contributor roles

Tim’s behavioural finance analysis has been featured widely across the investment community. He is a contributor for:

He is also frequently cited by financial commentators, writers and educators for his behavioural insights and market analysis.

The mission behind The Psy-Fi Blog / psyfi money

Tim founded The Psy-Fi Blog to give investors a deeper understanding of the psychological forces behind market movements.

His writing helps readers see:
  • How biases influence stock picking and strategy

  • Why investors repeatedly fall into the same emotional traps

  • How crowd behaviour drives market cycles

  • How awareness of psychology can make individuals more rational investors

The goal has always been to present finance through research, logic and humour, without relying on speculation or untested opinion.

Recognition

Tim’s work has earned consistent praise from experts, including:

  • “I read Tim’s Psy-Fi blog religiously… it turns my thinking upside down.” – Teresa A Daniels, Sullivan University

  • “It does as good a job as any in translating behavioural finance into lessons for individual investors.” – Tadas Viskanta, Abnormal Returns

These endorsements reflect the influence Tim’s writing has had on both professional and retail investors.

Personal background

Based in the United Kingdom, Tim balances his professional focus on psychology and finance with family life, technology interests and an enduring curiosity about the quirks of human behaviour. His writing continues to challenge assumptions, question market narratives and bring clarity to the emotional and cognitive forces behind investing.

Cursed By Momentum

Although most investors have no edge on the market there’s a proportion of them that persist in trading actively, the main effect of which is to enrich their brokers. There are various explanations of why this occurs, but it seems to come down to some combination of inherent overconfidence and

Anchors A-weigh!  December 2025

In these uncertain times, as the Covid-19 virus moves across the planet, we’re seeing markets yo-yoing with wild price fluctuations on almost a daily basis. Jumps or falls of over 5% are commonplace. This is not normal market behaviour. However, it isn’t unusual behaviour either – in the context of

Markets are a Confidence Trick

Many investors are experiencing the real downside of stockmarkets for the first time. Suddenly they’re no longer placid, happy holiday resorts where riches gently roll to shore simply by waiting. A volcano has erupted and everyone is running around with their hair on fire stealing each other’s coconuts and hoarding

The A to Z of Behavioral Bias

The A to Z of Behavioral Bias The A to Z of Behavioral Bias is (surprise, surprise!) an A to Z list of common behavioral biases with brief descriptions, examples, causes, possible mitigations and suggested further reading.  This isn’t intended to be a comprehensive list of biases – The Big

The Zeitgeist Investor

PsyFi Search The Zeitgeist Investor The Zeitgeist Investor: A Psy-Fi Blog E-book The Zeitgeist Investor is a time-bending look at how behavioral bias and market cycles interact to cause investors to do strange things.  Different times call for different approaches, but sometimes timeless approaches are the best. For the endnotes

The Latticework

PsyFi Search The Latticework The Psy-Fi Blog is dedicated to discussing finance and psychology and their links with physics, history, statistics, risk management, anthropology, biology, genetics, neurology, ethics, philosophy, mathematics, technology and anything else I can think of. See Mental Models, Arrayed on Charlie Munger’s Latticework and then follow the

The Big List of Behavioral Biases

PsyFi Search The Big List of Behavioral Biases See One Long Argument: A Big List of Behavioral Biases, as an introduction to this ever-growing list of irrational or, at least, slightly odd behaviours in the sphere of investment: Action Bias: we have an urge to action in situations where doing nothing

PFB Book Reviews

PsyFi Search PFB Book Reviews A list of book reviews on the Psy-Fi Blog: John Kay’s Obliquity: Why trying to solve problems directly isn’t a good idea and why economic models are always bound to be wrong. Models. Behaving Badly. by Emanuel Derman; models in finance aren’t the same as

The Psy-Fi Blog Reading List

PsyFi Search The Psy-Fi Blog Reading List A list of books I’d recommend for investors. Not all are directly related to investing but all have something useful to say about the subject. Clicking through to your local Amazon website from here earns the blog some cash which gets spent on

HONTI Home Page

PsyFi Search HONTI Home Page Overview HONTI is a series of articles about how not to invest, covering the wide range of weird and wonderful ways which people find to lose money in markets.  The principle here is simple: avoid losing money, exhibit sufficient patience and you’ll do all right