Speaker

Jason Zweig

Jason Zweig

Jason Zweig writes ‘The Intelligent Investor’ column for The Wall Street Journal and edited and annotated the revised edition of Benjamin Graham’s The Intelligent Investor. He spent his early career at Forbes, where he became mutual funds editor in 1992, and later worked at Money magazine and Time before joining the Journal.

Zweig is a financial journalist in the investigative tradition rather than a stock-picker: his guiding principle, absorbed from his Forbes editor Jim Michaels, is to never ‘get anybody’s blood on your hands’ — to treat a reader’s money with the seriousness one would give one’s own, and to tell readers what they need to know rather than what they want to hear. He has interviewed most of the leading investors of the past three decades, including repeated conversations with Warren Buffett, and spent two years assisting Daniel Kahneman on Thinking, Fast and Slow. His own books include Your Money and Your Brain, an early study of the neuroscience of investment decisions, and The Devil’s Financial Dictionary, a satirical glossary of Wall Street language.

Core positions

  • Indexing over active management, despite direct access to top managers. Although his career has given him unusual proximity to exceptional fund managers, Zweig invests his own money largely in index funds — he attributes this less to a theory of market efficiency than to a wish to avoid thinking about investing outside of work.
  • Overconfidence as the central bias to guard against, in both investors and himself. He treats public accountability — a Wall Street Journal column read by hundreds of thousands of people — as his own primary corrective, since errors draw correcting replies almost immediately.
  • Protection and projection are in permanent tension. Zweig regards Ben Graham’s emphasis on downside protection, forged by early financial trauma, as the foundational insight of value investing — and also its central unresolved problem, since protecting against every risk without ever projecting forward forfeits future growth.
  • Decision hygiene over willpower. Zweig argues that investors should convert as much of their process as possible into fixed if-then policy, on the view that subjective judgement fails precisely at the moments it matters most.
  • Diversification tracks the validity of conviction, not a fixed rule. He reads Graham’s broad diversification and Buffett and Munger’s concentration as two consistent responses to the same variable: how justified an investor’s confidence in a particular position actually is.

In the wiki