Juggling with Knives

Smart Investing in the Coming Age of Volatility

By: Jim Jubak

Narrated by: Jeff Cummings

Length: 14 hrs and 3 mins

Publisher's summary

In his new book, investment expert Jim Jubak explores the "new normal" of market volatility. With remarkable insights into the zeitgeist of financial markets and the economy, Jubak combines the big macro trends with the more mundane aspects of life to depict why volatility is here to stay, why things are not going to get any calmer soon, and how you can make investing decisions to profit off this new reality.

He presents a unified picture that extends far beyond a narrow view of financial markets, exploring the consequences of using global central banks - the Federal Reserve, the Bank of Japan, the People's Bank of China, and the European Central Bank - as cash machines; the debt model of growth now used worldwide; and the demographics of aging and the coming war between the young and the old.

He also looks at social trends including the anxiety of affluence, particularly the mismatch between the guaranteed cost of education and the uncertainty of future earnings; the real estate "barbell" and the consequences of viewing a home as a financial asset and not simply a place to live; and energy, climate, water, and food insecurity.

Jubak's mission is to teach investors how to stay sane when people think the sky is falling. In showing what is causing all of this volatility, he provides practical solutions for how you can smartly respond, build a portfolio, and profit.

©2016 Jim Jubak (P)2015 Brilliance Audio, all rights reserved.

loved it

I really like Jubak's interpretation of the relationship between world events and the economy. I really enjoyed the second half of the book where he tied everything into investing strategies.

Opens new doors understanding volatility

Encyclopedic overview of many markets world-wide and how they have or haven't worked together. There are many thought provoking examples of how one change someplace undermines or promotes big changes all over the place. This resulting volatility opens doors for an investor to make money, in both up and down markets. Good training for the over cautious.

The reader is outstanding. Lots of numbers and complex content. His excitement with the material keeps you glued to the storyline.

The writing is not stuffy--actually pretty amusing from time-to-time. I'm glad I listened.

Very timely; a good filter to view events through

This book uses numbers as needed to make points, but I wouldn't call it "quantitative." Given the very wide swath of its views, alongside the vast incalculable complexity of all the "moving parts" of the global economy it surveys, it rightly stays mostly qualitative and a few thousand feet above-ground while focusing serially on various contemporary issues -- various global markets, emerging technologies, demographic shifts, etc. We will each, of course, assign our own weightings to our own projections about how these things will play -- the very essence of free markets. The use of numbers never feels excessive or confusing. I agree with what seems the premise, that to over-define these things would lose probative force, and rather, it is better to get one's mind limber to the possibilities of lots of variables (surveyed here) going more volatile. This is the more modest and intelligent approach, versus the phony prophetic futurist "how to survive the next [precisely over-defined event") type books, which are effectively a roll of the dice by the author who may luck into being right (or mislead a lot of folks if wrong, again by luck). So this is like cross-training that would prepare an athlete for anything that comes up next; knowing with intelligent humility the environment will be mostly ill-predicted when we arrive there, and of course some events will break quickly and as never before. I would agree with a premise (as in Mauboussin's The Success Equation) that when events are apparently random, it is important to develop a good resilient strategy, allowing for how often one expects to be wrong in forecasting outcomes.
Juggling With Knives is (being apparently mostly written mid-2015) a good update to my own endless survey through books, articles, personal reflection, etc., of what is going on, sometimes matching my own wide-ranging gatherings of words and ideas, sometimes ranging beyond them. The lexicon used is contemporary and reflects a lot of smart thinkers and writers, who are sometimes quoted on key ideas. And, this work wears well with the more recent actual events in the markets (it seems just to have missed the latest rounds of stock market upheavals, but presages them well). Markets at present (January 2016) feel steeper and more time-compressed than they have for several years, which is a nice fit for this book's approach. This suggests, as a first draft of an approach to contemporary history, it is high in applicability, and the timing seems fortunate (and I would say, smart). Finally, there is a sizable segment on actual strategies.