An Instinct for Picking Winners

Gary Jacobson, B.A.’82, describes the beginnings of his career as one of Wall Street’s top-rated securities analysts as “accidental.”

“I had no idea about a career when I left Albany,” says Jacobson, who majored in rhetoric and communications. “I enrolled at Pace University to earn my M.B.A. and worked at a deli to make ends meet. After that, I moved into a building in Brooklyn. A guy down the hall from me suggested that I interview with a now-defunct brokerage house.”

It turned out to be Jacobson’s lucky break. His first job was working for a securities analyst specializing in studying toy companies. The first firm Jacobson ever covered was Coleco in Hartford, Conn. during the “Cabbage Patch Kids” mania in 1985-86. He correctly predicted Coleco would be a great success—at the height of Cabbage Patch Dolls’ popularity, the firm reported sales of $800 million—then later forecast its demise. He and his clients were able to get into and out of Coleco stock at just the right time. In 1988, Jacobson identified Blockbuster Entertainment as a good investment when the company had only 18 stores. Today, Blockbuster is the world’s largest retailer of rentable home video cassettes, DVDs and video games, with 6,500 stores in the U.S. and 26 other countries. He has studied hundreds of other companies during the course of his career, including Hasbro, Brunswick, Nike, Activision, Topps, Marvel and Toys-R-Us.

Jacobson’s instinct for picking winners made him a highly regarded analyst on Wall Street by his late 20s. In 1997, The Wall Street Journal named him its top-rated “All-Star” analyst in the entertainment industry. Shortly after receiving that accolade, however, Jacobson realized he needed a change of pace from his job as a managing director at Jefferies & Company, where he headed a group covering a diverse range of consumer-related companies.

“I woke up one morning very unhappy with the rat race on Wall Street and quit,” he says simply. “It was just too demanding. I was working six days a week, 14 hours a day, and on the road at least half of the time. The phone never stopped ringing. I had been to the Far East three times and Europe 25 times. I have several million frequent flyer miles I’m still working through.”

While he evaluates new career options, the 39-year-old New Yorker has made the most of his free time, traveling to exotic destinations, scuba diving, and mastering photography and cooking. He has also accepted a role as national chair of the University at Albany’s President’s Club, comprised of donors who contribute $1,000 or more annually. Membership in the club currently stands at 134, a number Jacobson hopes to at least double.

“We’re headed in the right direction with our fund-raising, but we have a long way to go. When I started to do research about private support for the University— remember I’m a research analyst—I was shocked by one number: 22 percent. That is the portion of the University’s budget that comes from the state. I don’t think most people realize it’s so small. Fund-raising is needed, and fund-raising can make a difference,” he said.

Jacobson, who grew up in East Brunswick, New Jersey, says he has fond memories of “a lot of good life experiences” at Albany. “I had never been away on my own before, so it was very exciting. It was the entire Albany experience, not just the academic experience, and it was very helpful to me as I went on in my career,” he says.

Jacobson has demonstrated his gratitude with several significant gifts to the University over the last decade, including one of the largest single gifts from an individual. In recognition, the University formally dedicated and renamed a lecture center in his honor at a ceremony last Oct. 29. He has also become the first member of the David Perkins Page Society, honoring a special new level of Annual Fund donors.

“I give to a number of charities, but I felt that here was a case where I could really make a difference,” he said. “I knew that this gift would not get lost in the shuffle.”