About Jim

So why give this guy any of your hard-earned money?

For the same reason you want to go hunting with an old dog who’s been out in the field in all kinds of weather and still lives for the chase.

Jim made his first personal investment in the early 1980s when zero coupon Treasury bonds were paying 12%. (Unfortunately, this opportunity followed close on the heels of a very satisfying but not terribly lucrative stint teaching college after earning a Ph.D. in English from the University of Virginia. Jim’s lack of capital to invest at 12% insured that he wouldn’t retire by the age of thirty-five.)

As a financial journalist for Venture and Worth Jim covered the boom of the 1980s and the crash of 1987. In the early 1990s he wrote the first comprehensive book, The Worth Guide to Electronic Investing, about what was then a new effort to put computers to work for individual investors. While senior financial editor at Worth, he built that magazine’s comprehensive rating system for mutual funds. (He vaguely remembers teaching himself Excel while on vacation on the shores of Lake Champlain and hopes that was only a bad dream.)

But that wasn’t enough punishment for Jim, oh no.

Beginning in 1997 and continuing for twelve years he wrote one of the first and ultimately the best-read stock picking column on the Internet, “Jubak’s Journal,” for Microsoft’s MSN Money. His initial boss, a hotshot software guy, said: “If you’re so good as a stock picker why don’t you do what no one else does and issue clear buys and sells and then track the results.” That resulted in what we believe was the first online, daily-priced stock portfolio on the Internet, Jubak’s Picks. And that portfolio begat a dividend portfolio and then a long-term global stock portfolio called the 50 Best Stocks in the World.

That last portfolio was the inspiration for Jim’s 2008 book The Jubak Picks: 50 Stocks That Will Rebuild Your Wealth & Safeguard Your Future (Crown Publishing Group, Hardcover).

All those portfolios—and Jim—withstood the technology crash of 2000 and the bear market that began in 2007.

In May 2009 Jim left MSN Money to start his own stock picking blog, JubakPicks.com, so that instead of writing two columns a week he could write three to five posts a day.

Some dogs just love to hunt.

A selection of his posts for JubakPicks.com won the 2009 Best in Business award from the Society of American Business Editors and Writers (SABEW).