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Mohrbooks Literary Agency
Sebastian Ritscher |
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HEADS I WIN, TAILS I WIN
Why Smart Investors Fail and How to Tilt the Odds in Your Favor
Spencer Jakab, the Wall Street Journal’s investing columnist, explains why you’re deluded about your personal investing returns, and what to do about it.
According to Wall Street Journal investing colum-nist Spencer Jakab, most of us have no idea how much money we’re leaving on the table—or that the average saver doesn’t come anywhere close to earning the “average” returns touted in those glossy brochures. We’re handicapped not only by psychological biases and a fear of missing out, but by an industry with multimillion-dollar marketing budgets and an eye on its own bottom line, not yours.
Unless you’re very handy, you probably don’t know how to fix your own car or give a family member a decent haircut. But most Americans are expected to be part-time fund managers. With a steady, livable pension check becoming a rarity, we’ve been entrusted with our own finances and, for the most part, failed miserably.
Since leaving his job as a top-rated stock ana-lyst to become an investing columnist, Jakab has watched his readers—and his family, friends, and colleagues—make the same mistakes again and again. He set out to evaluate the typical advice people get, from the clearly risky to the seemingly safe, to figure out where it all goes wrong and how they could do much better.
Jakab combines wise storytelling with a knack for doing the math on complicated ideas to explain why you shouldn’t buy Apple, or care about tomorrow’s big IPO, or even try to act on the belief that a recession is around the corner. He also explains why you should never trust a World Cup-predicting octopus, and why you shouldn’t invest in companies with an X or Z in their names—information more useful than it sounds, and every bit as fun.
Spencer Jakab writes the “Ahead of the Tape” column for the Wall Street Journal, where he also writes occasional Page One features. Previously, he had been a columnist at the Financial Times and before that ran Emerging Europe, Middle East and Africa equity research for Credit Suisse.
Unless you’re very handy, you probably don’t know how to fix your own car or give a family member a decent haircut. But most Americans are expected to be part-time fund managers. With a steady, livable pension check becoming a rarity, we’ve been entrusted with our own finances and, for the most part, failed miserably.
Since leaving his job as a top-rated stock ana-lyst to become an investing columnist, Jakab has watched his readers—and his family, friends, and colleagues—make the same mistakes again and again. He set out to evaluate the typical advice people get, from the clearly risky to the seemingly safe, to figure out where it all goes wrong and how they could do much better.
Jakab combines wise storytelling with a knack for doing the math on complicated ideas to explain why you shouldn’t buy Apple, or care about tomorrow’s big IPO, or even try to act on the belief that a recession is around the corner. He also explains why you should never trust a World Cup-predicting octopus, and why you shouldn’t invest in companies with an X or Z in their names—information more useful than it sounds, and every bit as fun.
Spencer Jakab writes the “Ahead of the Tape” column for the Wall Street Journal, where he also writes occasional Page One features. Previously, he had been a columnist at the Financial Times and before that ran Emerging Europe, Middle East and Africa equity research for Credit Suisse.
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Book
Published 2016-07-12 by Portfolio |
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Book
Published 2016-07-12 by Portfolio |