Alex, I'll Take "How to Invest Like a Jeopardy Champ" for $1000

Earlier this year, Arthur Chu won a staggering 11 games on Jeopardy, nearly $300,000 in prize money, and the unofficial title of "Jeopardy Villain."

Chu upset some gameshow purists with his counter-intuitive tactics. For instance, he relied on game theory to outmatch his opponents. Chu would often skip around from category to category and select the most valuable answers first. Fans who were used to contestants staying in one category, and starting with the least valuable answers, chafed at his approach. (Although Chu is hardly Jeopardy's first unconventional player.)

A few months after his epic run, Chu had to figure out what to do with his winnings, and how to adjust to life with a lot more money in the bank.

The 30-year-old voice-over artist and actor lives in Broadview Heights, Ohio, and recently spoke with Money.

(The interview has been edited.)

Viewers seemed to view you as a risky player, but you’ve maintained that your strategy was risk-averse. How so?

For some reason, probably because Jeopardy consistently refers to its points as "dollars," people don't get the most fundamental rule of how Jeopardy works -- the points you earn in the game are NOT dollars. They only turn into money if you win the game, if after Final Jeopardy you're in first place. If you aren't in first place, all your points disappear, your total is completely erased and you either get the 2nd-place $2,000 or 3rd-place $1,000 consolation prize and go home.

The expected value of winning the game versus losing is immense. Not one single dollar in your stack is worth anything if you lose. And yet people do irrational stuff all the time like make bets that ensure they'll still "have something" if they lose the bet, even though if you lose the game "having something" and "having $0" are completely equivalent -- you get the same consolation prize either way.

So imagine if you had some bizarre contract where if your investment portfolio hit a certain value by a certain time limit, you get to keep the money. But if it's below that value all the money is taken away. Do you see how this would be different from normal investing? How "low-risk" moves would actually be very high-risk moves -- the "safer" your portfolio is, the higher the risk that you won't hit your target and win the game, and all your money will vanish?

Speaking of risk, how do you view risk in your own portfolio?

When all I had was a small amount of savings I was invested conservatively to make sure that our total funds wouldn't dip too low in case we needed them -- specifically the Vanguard LifeStrategy Conservative Growth Fund (VSCGX).

Now that I have a much bigger stack I'm sitting on and the capacity to absorb more downside risk I have it all invested aggressively in Vanguard's Target Date 2050 Retirement Fund (VFIFX.) I'm trying to keep everything as automated as possible so that managing money can be one less drain on my thoughts and energy among all the other stuff I have to do.

What’s your long-term investing strategy? Do you own actively managed funds?

As long as I've been into investing I've been an indexer. I've absorbed the gospel of A Random Walk Down Wall Street, I follow the Bogleheads forum, I'm invested in Vanguard, all of that stuff.

I've yet to see a compelling, rational argument that says you come out ahead with active investing -- at least not without a lot more research and a lot more savvy that I really want to put into it. (You have to be able, as a non-financial professional yourself, to identify the managers you trust to give you above-market returns -- and not just above-market returns but returns that are enough above market to justify the cut they take. I've yet to see a reliable method for doing this.)

What goals will your winnings allow you to achieve?

It's not really buying stuff that matters most to me -- the single thing I value most that's most irreplaceable is my time. A nine-to-five job, while it comes with a lot of perks and a lot of security, takes the lion's share of the hours in the day away from me and puts them toward something I'd rather not be doing. To be able to live a life basically like the one I have now but to have that time freed up -- that's worth more than any car or any cruise.

What does all of this money buy you?

The main thing it buys is a feeling of peace. I have no intention of quitting my job in the near future but just knowing that you don't need a job is profoundly freeing.

Knowing that I could buy almost anything I wanted if I really wanted to is profoundly freeing -- and, paradoxically, having this knowledge means I no longer think about things I want but can't have nearly as much. When the thing that you'd be trading off for the lust-inspiring luxury is tangible -- when I know that I'd be trading, say, six months of not having to work for a shiny new convertible -- it puts things in perspective and helps push away the need to lust over such things.