Heads I Win, Tails I Win ─ Why Smart Investors Fail and How to Tilt the Odds in Your Favor

The Wall Street Journal's investing columnist explains why you're deluded about your personal investing returns.

Spencer Jakab has watched an awful lot readers make the same wrong-headed decisions again and again. It turns out even above average investors make less than if they just put their money in an index fund. That’s because almost every piece of advice you’ve heard about investing is based on intuition, randomness, or fear. In Leaving Lake Moneybegone,Jakab looks at all the advice, from terribly risky to seemingly safe, to show you how putting you money behind every strategy is likely to turn out. The paths that lead to seven figures are surprisingly few.

Jakab combines his wise storytelling with a knack for doing the math on complicated ideas to explain why you shouldn’t be buying Apple, or caring about tomorrow’s big IPO, or even trying to act on the belief a recession is just around the corner. He also explains how Biff could have made more money in Back to the Future III, 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.

The problem with most investment books is that they're either boring and rudimentary, or they assume you already know how most strategies work. Investors tired of get-rich-quick-schemes or dull overviews written when traders still shouted all their orders on the exchange floor will find this book a better guide to understanding Wall Street than anything else they’ve read.

In Leaving Lake Moneybegone, Spencer Jakab entertainingly explains (and discards) almost all of the most common approaches to investing, with his aim being the vast number of readers who fall in gap between 401k's for Dummies and microeconomics textbooks. He'll help readers: avoid the desire to time the market; avoid the pitfalls of generic financial advice; compound gains with only semi-annual tinkering; quit chasing hot stocks and big trends; understand why the big money managers are overpaid; see how the richest investors actually made their money; simplify your financial life; and get out of Lake Moneybegone, where even the above average investors lose!

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 theFinancial Times and before that ran Emerging Europe, Middle East and Africa equity research for Credit Suisse.