About in Minds & Values

Perspective

Finance is often presented as rational, data-driven and model-based. Yet markets are shaped by perception, emotion, incentives, along with collective narratives.

in Minds and Values sits at the crossroads of finance and human behaviour. It examines how our thinking - individually and collectively - not only influences investment decisions and leadership choices, but also our definition of long-term value.

Through this blog, I reflect on what I have observed in financial institutions and what I later studied in neuroscience and psychology: how judgment forms under uncertainty, how narratives move markets, how values shape strategy. The aim is to connect money and meaning, performance and awareness, in a way that remains grounded in both practice and research.

Who I am

Hi, I'm Julie!

Focusing on sustainable finance during my upper studies, I've always believed finance was as much about people as it is about numbers. Call me naive!

When entering the workforce in investment banking and then asset management, I realised that every strategy, every market move, every investment ultimately comes down to people: their thinking, values and resilience. Judgement under uncertainty, group dynamics, risk perception, along with narrative framing, often played as significant a role as financial analysis.

This observation and the importance I placed on valuing human capital and mental health led me to study neuroscience and psychology at King’s College London. I wanted to understand, in formal terms, how we think, make decisions, but also regulate emotion or form beliefs - particularly, under complexity and pressure.

Why look at this intersection?

What drives financial decisions when data is incomplete and outcomes are uncertain?

Finance operates under uncertainty with models bringing some structure and merely helping us make sense of it.

Investment committees interpret information through prior beliefs. Markets move not just on recent news or fundamentals but also on how participants expect others to react. In organisations, how leaders handle stress, tension or dissent can influence how decisions unfold and their quality and quietly steer the whole decision-making climate.

Insights from behavioural finance reveal patterns in judgment and choice. Neuroscience explores the mechanisms behind them, from rapid threat responses to habit formation. These various mechanisms and layers intertwine, shaping how individuals and teams think, decide and adapt - with leadership research examining how individual cognitive patterns scale within groups.

Seeing this more clearly doesn’t dissolve uncertainty. It helps build a different relationship with it - one grounded in curiosity, awareness and a deeper understanding of human behaviour within complex systems.

What you will find here

in Minds and Values is a research-informed reflection space organised around three themes:

Risk & Market Psychology

Topics include loss aversion, volatility, narrative contagion, overconfidence and reflexivity. Think about posts on cognitive biases, emotional responses or recursive belief dynamics and how they shape market behaviour.

Leadership & Decision-Making

Topics will explore how self-awareness, cognitive flexibility and emotional regulation influence strategic judgement and organisational performance, as well as broader questions of resilience, tolerance for ambiguity or collective decision-making.

Values and Long-Term Value Creation

The aim here is to explore the link between meaning, motivation and durable performance (e.g. how incentives, identity and ethical frameworks shape capital allocation and sustainability strategies).

The intention is not to provide investment advice or market forecasts. Rather, it is to examine the cognitive and psychological foundations that underpin financial and organisational outcomes.

Intellectual commitments

This platform rests on several principles:

• Long-term thinking over short-term reactivity

• Critical examination of bias in both markets and leadership

• Integration of sustainability as a strategic, not cosmetic, consideration

• Respect for empirical research and methodological rigour

• Recognition that awareness precedes improvement