Audiobook8 hours
Heads I Win, Tails I Win: Why Smart Investors Fail and How to Tilt the Odds in Your Favor
Written by Spencer Jakab
Narrated by Sean Pratt
Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars
3.5/5
()
About this audiobook
INVESTING IS ONE OF THE FEW AREAS IN LIFE WHERE EVEN VERY SMART PEOPLE LET HOPE TRIUMPH OVER EXPERIENCE
According to Wall Street Journal investing columnist 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 analyst 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.
Blending entertaining stories with some surprising research, Jakab explains
·How a typical saver could have a retirement nest egg twice as large by being cheap and lazy.
·Why investors who put their savings with a high-performing mutual fund manager end up worse off than if they'd picked one who has struggled.
·The best way to cash in on your hunch that a recession is looming.
·How people who check their brokerage accounts frequently end up falling behind the market.
·Who isn't nearly as good at investing as the media would have you think.
He also explains why you should never trust a World Cup-predicting octopus, why you shouldn't invest in companies with an X or a Z in their names, and what to do if a time traveler offers you economic news from the future.
Whatever your level of expertise, Heads I Win, Tails I Win can help you vastly improve your odds of investment success.
According to Wall Street Journal investing columnist 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 analyst 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.
Blending entertaining stories with some surprising research, Jakab explains
·How a typical saver could have a retirement nest egg twice as large by being cheap and lazy.
·Why investors who put their savings with a high-performing mutual fund manager end up worse off than if they'd picked one who has struggled.
·The best way to cash in on your hunch that a recession is looming.
·How people who check their brokerage accounts frequently end up falling behind the market.
·Who isn't nearly as good at investing as the media would have you think.
He also explains why you should never trust a World Cup-predicting octopus, why you shouldn't invest in companies with an X or a Z in their names, and what to do if a time traveler offers you economic news from the future.
Whatever your level of expertise, Heads I Win, Tails I Win can help you vastly improve your odds of investment success.
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Reviews for Heads I Win, Tails I Win
Rating: 3.4000000200000002 out of 5 stars
3.5/5
10 ratings2 reviews
- Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5Listen to the last 10 minutes and you'll get everything you can out of this book. It spends the rest of the time talking about different simulations and throwing % gains/losses without much continuity. Buy index funds, don't try to beat the market, if you already know that then you know everything in this book.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5I do not read investment books. Most, if not all, usually involve a lot of technical language and terms that I do not understand. However Jakab's book was easy to grasp – – it was useful for the novice and for those who have had plenty of investment experience. Listed below are the top five lessons I took from the book:
The more prominent the scary headlines about the market, This smarter it is to commit some more money to stocks.
As for the majority of downturns, the time to sell is never.
The simplest remedy for sleeping well at night is to have a mixture of lower risk assets like bonds along with stocks.
Rule of thumb for stock exposure: 100 minus your age = stock exposure
No matter how much evidence exists that seers do not exist, suckers will pay for the existence of seers.