Contemporary Authors

• Heads I Win, Tails I Win: Why Smart Investors Fail and How to Tilt the Odds in Your Favor Portfolio (New York, NY), 2016

https://lccn.loc.gov/2016285179 Jakab, Spencer, author. Heads I win, tails I win : why smart investors fail and how to tilt the odds in your favor / Spencer Jakab. New York, New York : Portfolio/Penguin, [2016] vi, 280 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm HG4521 .J27 2016 ISBN: 0399563202 (hardcover)9780399563201 (hardcover)

• Spencer Jakab - https://spencerjakab.com/

  About me

  Warhol4

  Hi there! This is the official website of journalist and author Spencer Jakab. If you’re interested in my book or my professional writing, you’ve come to the right place. If you’re more interested in food, travel, or just me personally, check out my private website, Cacophony and Cheese.

  I write for and am the deputy editor of the Journal’s “Heard on the Street” column. It has run in the paper in one form or another since the 1920s and is regarded as the leading financial and economic analysis opinion column around. Before that I wrote the “Ahead of the Tape” column which runs each weekday and previews the day’s most important economic or business event. Prior to joining the WSJ I wrote “Lex” for Britain’s Financial Times, a storied column that carries no byline but is produced by a team of talented writers on three continents, and also the weekend “On Wall Street” column. I got my start in journalism at Dow Jones Newswires where I wrote an award-winning investing column and reported about energy, contributing several pieces to Barron’s Magazine.

  My first career was in finance. I lived in Europe for a decade, mostly working as an emerging markets stock analyst and later the head of a stock research team at a major investment bank. I learned a lot, traveled to some very cool places, but got bored with corporate life and decided to write about money instead of making so darn much of it.

  Nearly everything I know about investing was picked up on the job or through reading but, for what it’s worth, earned a master’s degree in international affairs from Columbia University, a certificate from The Harriman Institute at the same place, and an M.A. in political science from Brandeis University.

• The Wall Street Journal - http://topics.wsj.com/person/J/spencer-jakab/6915

  Spencer Jakab
  Reporter, The Wall Street Journal.

  Spencer Jakab is Deputy Editor for Heard on the Street. Previously wrote Ahead of the Tape and was a Lex Columnist at the Financial Times. He also spent time as a reporter for Dow Jones Newswires and ran Emerging Europe, Middle East and Africa equity research for Credit Suisse. He can be reached at Spencer.Jakab@wsj.com.

• Penguin Random House - http://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/authors/2109566/spencer-jakab

  SPENCER JAKAB writes for and edits the “Heard on the Street” col­umn for The Wall Street Journal and previously wrote its daily investing column, “Ahead of the Tape.” He has also written about investing for the Financial Times, Barron’s, and Dow Jones News­wires. Prior to becoming a journalist, he was a top-rated stock analyst covering emerging markets at Credit Suisse. This is his first book.

• Time - http://time.com/money/4400920/investing-lessons-spencer-jakab/

  PORTFOLIO
  5 Ways to Make Smarter Investing Decisions—By Outsmarting Yourself
  Kerry Close
  Jul 12, 2016
  The best thing you can do for your portfolio may be absolutely nothing.
  A steady, mechanical approach to investing is a predominant theme throughout Heads I Win, Tails I Win, a new book released today by Wall Street Journal "Heard on the Street" writer and editor Spencer Jakab. The former Credit Suisse stock analyst emphasizes that the vast majority of investors are wired to think they're better at making money than they actually are—and that we ignore all evidence to the contrary.
  The solution? "Put into place a process that will stop you from sabotaging yourself," Jakab recommended when we spoke to him this week. That means investing in a methodical—and even mechanical—way, rather than reacting to the ups and downs of the market and pundits predicting gloom and doom on TV.
  Here are five more guidelines that Jakab says can help you outsmart yourself and, ultimately, generate better investing returns:
  1. Acknowledge your shortcomings.
  Self-deception isn't all bad: It enhances our self-esteem and even our happiness. But it can be deadly when it comes to investing—and studies show that people tend to grossly overestimate their investing acumen. Jakab points to a survey by some German finance professors in which investors estimated that they made nearly 15% a year over four years, when in fact they'd netted only 3.7% (and only 20% of them had kept pace with the market as a whole).
  Instead, accept the fact that you're prone to errors when making quick decisions on your own. Focus on a steady strategy of investing and rebalance your portfolio once or twice a year at predetermined times. By avoiding the temptation to react impulsively during bad times, you'll avoid damaging mistakes and capture extra returns by default.
  Play Video
  Why Should I Invest At All?
  Financial planners explain why putting money in the stock market is a good idea.
  2. Hire a cheap financial planner—or none at all.
  RELATED
  East Liverpool police officer Fred Flati shows a photo on his phone, depicting a child in the backseat after an adult overdosed in the driver's seat, on Sept. 7, 2016. The image was later released by the City of East Liverpool Police Department and immediately went viral on Facebook.
  PORTFOLIO
  The Small Town Police Force Behind the Viral Photo of an Overdose
  Unless you're wildly impulsive or reactive, you probably don't need a financial planner, says Jakab. Statistically, a pro is unlikely to be much better than you at picking stocks. Instead, assess your level of risk and invest in appropriate, low-cost funds (perhaps drawn from the MONEY 50 list of best mutual funds and ETFs). But if feel you need a pro to help you develop a long-term financial plan, or to talk you out of making bad snap decisions, Jakab advises hiring one on the cheap. (Here's some guidance on finding a good adviser, and here are five red flags that should warn you away from a would-be one.)
  3. Learn from your mistakes.
  Jakab noted that many people who were hit hard by the dot-com crash in the early 2000s also saw their portfolio returns take a dive during the housing bubble. While the two situations were not exactly the same, these investors could have learned from the first crisis not to get caught up in explosive headlines and social panic—a lesson that might have allowed them to avoid the second.

  In order to avoid making costly mistakes, decide at the outset that you will revisit your portfolio once or twice a year—and stick to your self-imposed schedule. "The world is only going to end once," Jakab says. "You have to basically just switch off your emotions."
  4. Keep your ethical impulses and your investing decisions separate.
  Socially or environmentally-conscious has gained popularity in recent years, a trend encouraged by financial services firms and even some academic studies suggesting that returns from socially responsible investing beat those of traditional investments.
  However, in his book, Jakab points to the example of CalPERS, a California state retirement fund that in 2001 decided to sell some of its South Asian holdings because of concerns over labor practices and human rights issues at the companies. The next year, markets in Thailand, India, and Sri Lanka posted stellar returns.
  It's not wrong to have ethical standards, of course, but Jakab argues against letting them play a role in your investing decisions. If your moral compass is bothering you, he suggests, keep in mind that owning a few shares of a public company won't impact its practices one way or another. You're buying shares from another investor in the secondary market for those shares, not handing the company new money to fund operations.
  5. Don't rush to get in on that hot new deal.
  Jakab cites plenty of examples of stocks that were supposedly deals you could not miss out on—like video game company Zynga, the creator of Mafia Wars and FarmVille, which ultimately lost 75% of its value within three years of going public. In fact, the odds of striking it rich by getting in early on the next Google or Facebook are staggeringly low. And as my MONEY colleague Paul Lim wrote last year,
  "The fact is, unless you gain access to an IPO at a great price at issuance, you can’t view those stocks as buy-and-hold investments. And you should avoid any richly priced new stock altogether."

• Abnormal Returns - https://abnormalreturns.com/2016/07/13/qa-with-spencer-jakab-author-of-heads-i-win-tails-i-win/

  Q&A with Spencer Jakab author of “Heads I Win, Tails I Win”
  July 13, 2016
  Q&A with Spencer Jakab author of “Heads I Win, Tails I Win”
  July 13, 2016
  HeadsIWinIt’s not uncommon for some one to go from the sell-side to the buy-side. It is far less common for some one to go from the sell-side to financial journalism. Spencer Jakab the author of the newly published Heads I Win, Tails I Win: Why Smart Investors Fail and How to Tile the Odds In Your Favor has spent time as a highly-rated equity analyst and as a “Heard on the Street” columnist at the WSJ.
  This combination of experiences gives Jakab a unique perspective on the financial markets and investing in general. Jakab uses his first book as an opportunity to speak to individual investors about evidence-based ways they can better manage their portfolio. That and he gives us some insight into his proprietary measure: the “Hungarian Grandmother Indicator.” Below you can see my questions in bold. Spencer’s answers follow.
  AR: As we write we are in the midst of a Brexit-induced spike in volatility. In a chapter of the book you talk about both having some sense for market sentiment and the importance of ‘maintaining your cool.’ Can the average investor do both simultaneously?
  SJ: It’s by definition very hard to be dispassionate if you’re the “average” or typical investor. The public mood has to sweep up most members of the public in order to qualify as such after all. Human nature is what it is.
  My book has a lot of anecdotes that I hope will give people pause during the next mania or crash, though, and forewarned is forearmed. My concrete advice is for them to insulate their savings from bad decisions ahead of time. That could involve committing to a mechanical, passive approach to investing and or perhaps engaging someone like an advisor who thinks that way and can give them a sanity check.
  AR: In the book you talk about how once you joined the bank where you were an equity analyst you instantly gained stature in the eyes of strangers. That and an anecdote about a financial television appearance underlie our need for ‘seers’ as you put it. Can we ever really shake our need for forecasts, confidently stated?
  SJ: It took being in that business for me to see that the emperor has no clothes and I’m cynical by nature so this is a very tough nut to crack. People want to believe that there are gurus out there, especially when it comes to their money. Of course it’s possible to make sense and be right about many things without having an edge in security selection. One of my columns or an analyst’s report can be full of smart insights and salient facts, but those are almost always baked into the price of the stock they’re about.
  I’m asked all the time what I think about the market by acquaintances or strangers who find out what I do for a living. That’s probably the case with many of your readers too. Probably eight times out of ten, though, I give them my speech about how I really don’t have any superior insights and their response is something like: “Uh huh. So what do you think about Apple at this price?”
  It’s frustrating, but there’s a psychological explanation for it. A person who recognizes their limitations and is self-effacing ultimately is less influential than someone who expresses self-confidence, irrespective of the latter’s track record. Let’s not forget that most purported seers earn their living by sounding confident. Most of them are conning themselves rather than their audience, downplaying their misses and exaggerating their hits in their own minds.
  AR: You have the unique experience of having worked at the highest levels both on the sell side and financial journalism. You note how investors should take the growth estimates of analysts with a ‘big grain of salt.’ What is the analogy for financial journalism?
  SJ: That’s an interesting question. On the one hand, journalists don’t have the same conflicts that stymie some analysts. That, and the fact that we’re less likely to miss the forest for the trees, makes an analytical column like Heard on the Street, which I edit, and the FT Lex Column, for which I used to write, so refreshing. In terms of something like stock selection, though, I think we’re neither better nor worse than the pros who make multiples of our salaries.
  One interesting criticism of financial journalists is that, when something makes the headline of a major paper or the cover of a magazine, it usually means the trend is about to reverse. There’s something to that, but keep two things in mind. First, nobody reads an article stating “nothing to see here folks.” Dramatic stories sell papers. Furthermore, the sources for alarming or exuberant stories are financial professionals that journalists interview so those articles are really a reflection of the faulty conventional wisdom of the “experts.”
  AR: One area where you recommend investors deviate from low cost index funds is in the area of ‘fundamental indices.’ As smart beta goes this is a strategy with a long track record. What do you think about the explosion in smart beta ETFs and the hype surrounding them?
  SJ: I think there’s a lot of substance to many products that fall under “smart beta,” but you use the right word in calling it hype. It seems to me that smart passive is becoming the new active as one company’s formula competes with another the way star managers do. Unfortunately, beta is getting smarter at a far more rapid clip than investors are getting wiser. I see the danger of people jumping from one strategy to another in a counterproductive way.
  If you put your money into a fundamental index or value fund or something like that you’ll probably be pleased in the very long run but will suffer periods of underperformance. Many investors will get discouraged and abandon those strategies at precisely the wrong times, turning smart beta into a dumb investment through no fault of the product.
  AR: In the book you talk about the importance of recognizing the relationship between skill and luck. In my opinion this is a fundamentally different way of viewing the world and one that gets glossed over in the financial press. How should investors re-orient how they view investment performance in light of this and problems like survivorship bias?
  SJ: People see patterns where none exist and elevate (or repudiate) investing heroes like Bill Miller during and after his streak. Overwhelming evidence shows, though, that star investors are probably 97% lucky and that the remaining 3% are very hard to identify. What’s more, as you say, the overall numbers on active management are misleading because of survivorship bias.
  A smart person’s stock answer to that is ‘Warren Buffett.” I don’t insist that Buffett is a fluke though because so many successful investors share traits with him. It is those traits – patience mostly, as well as their process – that sets them apart. Instead of jumping from star to star, a retail investor should focus on why that has worked in the long run and not who just got named “fund manager of the year” or whatever.
  AR: You and I have had the same experience: when you tell someone you are involved in the markets you usually get a highly inappropriate question. Like what do you think of gold in here? Or do you think Twitter is going to get acquired? Did you write the book so you could tell people ‘read the book’ or is there a better way of handling these types of questions?
  SJ: I wrote the book with those questions in mind, but not because I don’t want to engage people directly. Obviously I can reach a lot more people this way. I think it will have better results too. Both experts as well as ordinary people who don’t work in finance and read sample chapters said it changed their way of looking at investing. My two minute shpiel about staying the course, regular rebalancing, and keeping costs low never gets a response like that.
  AR: In the book you allude to the ‘law of active management’ and the mathematical impossibility of the average investor ‘beating the market.’ Besides passing through the school of hard knocks how can investors acquire the modesty required to follow a low cost, low activity portfolio you recommend?
  SJ: Probably the most surprising thing I found in doing research for the book is how unaware people are of their own historical returns other than a vague sense that they really should have more money. If people had to rate themselves from zero to 10 relative to all investors and also relative to the market, the median guess would be a 7 on both. The reality is that they’re a 5 and a 2, respectively. So modesty won’t cut it.
  My approach was to appeal to their greed instead. The title sounds like a “get rich quick” type book, which this certainly isn’t. But I’m guessing it will get their attention. Telling people that their nest egg could be twice as large or more with a few changes to their investing habits is not only true but, I hope, an attention-getter.

Jakab, Spencer. Heads I Win, Tails I Win: Why Smart
Investors Fail and How To Tilt the Odds in Your Favor
Doug Diesenhaus
Library Journal.
141.10 (June 1, 2016): p102.
COPYRIGHT 2016 Library Journals, LLC. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
http://www.libraryjournal.com/
Full Text: 
Jakab, Spencer. Heads I Win, Tails I Win: Why Smart Investors Fail and How To Tilt the Odds in Your Favor. Portfolio. Jul. 2016. 288p. illus.
notes, index. ISBN 9780399563201. $28; ebk. ISBN 9780399563218. BUS
As the title suggests, Jakab, a writer and editor for the Wall StreetJournal's "Heard on the Street" column and a former stock analyst at Credit
Suisse, takes a dim view of Wall Street fund managers. He repeatedly bemoans the ways in which "savers are parted from their money" by
professionals playing a zero-sum game with the funds of regular folks on the losing end, including retirees, young workers, and families. The
book focuses more on what investors shouldn't do--such as listening to hot, get-rich advice--and shows how the volume, confidence, and selfassuredness
of media pundits is often inversely related to their accuracy rate. Jakab is no anticapitalist, though. He believes in making money--he
just recommends doing it with an investment strategy he describes as "less is more" and "cheap and lazy." "Throughout this book," writes the
author, "I've encouraged you to pay as little as possible and do as little as possible to make sure your nest egg grows." His prime strategy is to
choose low-cost index funds and then mosdy look away. VERDICT With a knack for telling a story with humor and detail, Jakab presents a book
that will appeal to thrifty fans of index investing and some supporters of Bernie Sanders.--Doug Diesenhaus, Univ. of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
Source Citation   (MLA 8th
Edition)
Diesenhaus, Doug. "Jakab, Spencer. Heads I Win, Tails I Win: Why Smart Investors Fail and How To Tilt the Odds in Your Favor." Library
Journal, 1 June 2016, p. 102+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA453919939&it=r&asid=ec014bc7f9d17f09ba1416cd80bca10e. Accessed 6 Feb.
2017.
2/5/2017 General OneFile - Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1486358197686 2/3
Gale Document Number: GALE|A453919939

---
Heads I Win, Tails I Win: Why Smart Investors Fail and
How to Tilt the Odds in Your Favor
Publishers Weekly.
263.19 (May 9, 2016): p59.
COPYRIGHT 2016 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text: 
Heads I Win, Tails I Win: Why Smart Investors Fail and How to Tilt the Odds in Your Favor
Spencer Jakab. Penguin/Portfolio, $28 (268p) ISBN 978-0-399-56320-1
Jakab, editor of the Wall Street Journal's "Heard on the Street" column, is concerned about the money being left on the table by blithely ignorant
amateur investors; he wrote this book, according to the preface, to help civilians understand what's happening to their money, and how to fix the
situation. In almost no other area of life are people expected to manage something so important with so little information. "With gold watches and
a steady, livable pension check becoming a rarity," Jakab writes, "we've been entrusted with our own finances and for the most part failed
miserably." And professionals may not do much better. The "composite fund investor" earned an annualized 2.5% during the 30 years of a study
by fund evaluation firm Dalbar--a terrible showing. Jakab's efforts to acquaint readers with the basic realities of the market and to provide an
insider's view of how to approach money management will be comprehensible to even the most intimidated reader. Energetic and engaging, this
is required reading for anyone who'd like to retire ahead of the game. (July)
Source Citation   (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Heads I Win, Tails I Win: Why Smart Investors Fail and How to Tilt the Odds in Your Favor." Publishers Weekly, 9 May 2016, p. 59+. General
OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA452883364&it=r&asid=6ef2a7cd6c46a3f7334396f1d0dfb51f. Accessed 6 Feb. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A452883364

Diesenhaus, Doug. "Jakab, Spencer. Heads I Win, Tails I Win: Why Smart Investors Fail and How To Tilt the Odds in Your Favor." Library Journal, 1 June 2016, p. 102+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do? p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA453919939&it=r. Accessed 6 Feb. 2017. "Heads I Win, Tails I Win: Why Smart Investors Fail and How to Tilt the Odds in Your Favor." Publishers Weekly, 9 May 2016, p. 59+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA452883364&it=r. Accessed 6 Feb. 2017.

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