Too Smart for Our Own Good

Book Review by getAbstract, April 22, 2019: “Bruce Jacobs offers some hard-hitting wisdom gleaned from his detailed knowledge and experience in market investing. Fund managers and investors of all types will find value in his exploration of the common causes of financial calamities.” getAbstract rates the book a 9 (out of 10) in Importance.

A Decade Later, What We Still Have to Learn About Market Crises

by Bruce I. Jacobs, McGraw-Hill Business Blog, February 25, 2019: Many of the underlying causes of the 2007-2008 financial crises have destabilized markets in the past and could do so in the future, Jacobs said in an article highlighting the thesis of his new book, Too Smart for Our Own Good: Ingenious Investment Strategies, Illusions of Safety, and Market Crashes... The common threads running through these crises are products and strategies that claim to make investing safer, but have the potential to interact in damaging ways with investor psychology. Despite their purported safety, such products and strategies have actually increased risk by creating conditions that give rise to financial storms.

Jack Bogle Remembered for Imprint on Investing

by Danielle Walker, Pensions & Investments, January 21, 2019: Bogle, a lifelong advocate of index investing was “no fan of the offshoots,” noted Bruce Jacobs. Bogle believed that exchange-traded funds “encouraged speculation,” and that smart beta funds were “‘stupid’ and not true index funds.” Jacobs added that Bogle... “never wavered from his single-minded focus on the mathematics of index funds, which he said could be calculated by a second grader: gross return minus costs equals an investor's return. Anything that increased cost or obscured the simplicity of that formula drew his enmity.”