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Hidden Forces

A Practical History of Financial Markets | Russell Napier

Hidden Forces

Demetri Kofinas

Government, Business

4.8 • 1.6K Ratings

🗓️ 6 November 2025

⏱️ 26 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Demetri Kofinas speaks with financial historian and investor Russell Napier about his "Practical History of Financial Markets" online course, which is provided in conjunction with Edinburgh Business School.

Hidden Forces premium subscribers can sign up using their subscriber email + code "HF50" for a generous 50% DISCOUNT. Genius members can access the course for an even more generous discount of 75%. Sign up today at libraryofmistakes.com/course.

The course runs in three formats: a ~14-hour online version; a two-and-a-half-day in-person version in London (capped at about 30 people); and a university version for mostly post-grad students. This is not just for professionals—many attendees are principals or retail savers who feel responsible for managing their and their families' wealth.

The course is "radically different" from standard finance classes. Instead of starting from pricing theory or discounted cash flow, it takes a historical approach to asset valuation across equities, bonds, cash, commodities, and property, asking the question: "what repeatable conditions caused valuations to change?" The course leans heavily on long-run U.S. and international data, examines market behavior in different monetary and inflation regimes, and includes a module on investing in periods of inflation, disinflation, and deflation.

After completing this course, you should be able to:

✔️ Critically evaluate different methods of valuing stock markets and identify faults in the valuation methods.

✔️ Explain the idea of mean reversion in financial markets and identify valuation techniques that follow mean reversion using data from the last 100 years to demonstrate this.

✔️ Understand the impact inflationary or deflationary forces have on the returns to different classes of financial assets.

✔️ Understand the impact liquidity and the supply of money has on stock market returns over time.

✔️ Understand the impact of psychological biases on returns in the stock market and the role that they can play in major stock market events.

✔️ Critically evaluate the lessons from the history of the financial markets over the past 200 years or more.

As Russell has often said, "when regime change occurs, the greatest risk for any investor is to get all the right answers to all the wrong questions." The ultimate goal of this course is to teach people how to find and ask the RIGHT questions.

Subscribe to our premium content—including our premium feed, episode transcripts, and Intelligence Reports—by visiting HiddenForces.io/subscribe.

If you'd like to join the conversation and become a member of the Hidden Forces Genius community—with benefits like Q&A calls with guests, exclusive research and analysis, in-person events, and dinners—you can also sign up on our subscriber page at HiddenForces.io/subscribe.

If you enjoyed today's episode of Hidden Forces, please support the show by:

Producer & Host: Demetri Kofinas
Editor & Engineer: Stylianos Nicolaou

Subscribe and support the podcast at https://hiddenforces.io.
Join the conversation on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter at @hiddenforcespod
Follow Demetri on Twitter at @Kofinas

Episode Recorded on 10/31/2025

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0

Russell Napier, welcome back to Hidden Forces.

0:09.3

Dmitri, it's good to be back and we're both surrounded by books.

0:12.7

Yes, that's right, but your setup is way cooler.

0:16.6

You've got four giant stacks of books in front of your shelves because it just shows you that it's overflowing. You're overflowing with knowledge, Russell, which is why we come to you. Overflowing the books is not necessarily the same thing as you know. I've got to need a bigger boat if I can paraphrick that line from Jaws. Right, right, that's right. So this is actually not an episode. I said, welcome back to Hidden

0:38.3

Forces. It's not exactly an episode and it's in fact the first time that I'm doing anything

0:42.0

like this and this is strictly a promotion of your course, a practical history of financial

0:46.8

markets, which I should note is listed under the title Advanced Valuation in Financial

0:52.7

Markets on the Edinburgh University website. So when you

0:55.9

go to Library of Mistakes.com to sign up for the practical history of financial markets,

1:00.4

you'll be redirected to the university's website to sign up for the course under a different

1:04.9

name. So don't let that dissuade you or confuse you. You're in the right place. So back to what I was saying, Russell, we've promoted guests' work in the past.

1:13.9

In small instances, we've run a previous promotion for you for this specific course that

1:18.5

we're going to discuss today.

1:20.1

And I've run similar discounts for the American Affairs Journal.

1:24.3

And I cannot recall another instance where I've actually done this, where we've

1:29.1

run an explicit promotion for someone else. And on that note, it's important to state

1:33.2

up front that I don't get any kind of financial benefit or take any kind of profit from this

1:38.0

course or from any of the sales of this course. All of those profits go to your nonprofit that

1:43.6

supports the library of mistakes

1:45.4

and makes donations and conducts other charitable work in the field of financial education.

1:50.7

However, I have and continue to profit from your mentorship, Russell, and from all of the

1:58.6

conversation that we've had both on and off the air over the years,

...

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