JUGGLING WITH KNIVES

Investment guru Jubak (The Jubak Picks: 50 Stocks that Will Rebuild Your Wealth & Safeguard Your Future, 2008, etc.) analyzes the growing volatility of both the financial markets and everyday life (jobs, housing, an aging population, climate change, etc.) and offers strategies for profiting in a topsy-turvy world.

A former editor at Worth, the author now edits JubakPicks.com, where his portfolio has returned 445 percent since 1997. In this informative, often entertaining book, he details the many ways in which frequent zigzags since 2000 in the financial markets—especially abrupt changes of acceleration and direction—have combined with events in the housing, job, and retirements markets to increase our expectations about the degree of volatility in everyday life. Heightened volatility is now “embedded” in the stock market, writes Jubak. Furthermore, our aging world brings rising medical costs and requires more pension payments. China alone—“the world’s fastest-aging society,” with an inadequate pension system and underfunded health care—poses a global volatility risk. Drawing on his experiences of the last 20 years in the financial market, the research of behavioral economists and neuroscientists, and projections for the immediate future, Jubak describes ways to better understand the scope and direction of rapid changes in key areas and ways to “limit the downside damage and increase the upside potential from this volatility in our portfolios and our lives.” He stresses that by determining the distribution of volatility in a given market, it is possible to find a “haven of lower volatility.” Besides understanding the underlying forces at work, the author urges readers to resist the impulse to engage in the flight-or-fight response in reacting to dizzying changes. Whether discussing the effects of food and water shortages or the boom-and-bust real estate markets in such diverse enclaves as hipster Williamsburg (Brooklyn) and Boomer Sarasota (Florida), Jubak brightly illuminates the trends shaping our present era.

Solid advice for thoughtful investors.