Barry Ritholtz Quotes
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Mutual fund managers want your money in their funds. They get paid based on assets under management.
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With Twitter, you can build your own virtual trading floor and research department, populated by the smartest people on earth. Almost any subject or sector has you can think of, you can find a few people with an expertise in that area.
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It is in your DNA to love a good story. You know, neat tales with heroes and villains and conflicts to resolve. A good story pushes our buttons, is exciting and memorable.
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Active management leads to lots of poor investor behavior. It sends people chasing after whoever has the hot hand at the moment.
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Any investment bought via credit always runs the risk of margin calls and, eventually, liquidation.
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Despite all the media coverage, glitz and glam of hedge funds, they have not done well for their investors. They have high - some say excessively high - fees; their short- and long-term performance has been poor.
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If your investing approach requires that you become Nostradamus to succeed, then you are destined to fail.
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When markets are rallying, cash in the portfolio is a drag on performance, returning about zero.
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Many hedge fund managers have become billionaires; perhaps this - plus their reputations as the smartest guys in the room - is why they have captured the investing public's imagination.
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People who work in specialized fields seem to have their own language. Practitioners develop a shorthand to communicate among themselves. The jargon can almost sound like a foreign language.
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Footage of people camped out at Best Buy or elsewhere is not remotely a celebration. Rather, it's a reminder of just how economically distressed a large percentage of our populace is.
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Salesmen always need something to sell.
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Anyone can make an article longer; the skill is keeping it tight and lean.
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If I am going to trash others for their dumb predictions, I must at least hold myself to the same sort of accountability.
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You can blow on the dice all you want, but whether they come up 'seven' is still a function of random luck.
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Based on a lifetime of observations and a few decades in the markets, I understand that societies, beliefs and fashions all move in long arcs of time. We call these arcs several things: cycles, periods, eras.
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If you think too-big-to-fail banks are not worthy of investment because of their impossible-to-read balance sheets, well then, don't buy them.
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Owning a variety of asset classes means that some part of your portfolio will be doing well when the cyclical turmoil arises. A broadly diversified portfolio includes large capitalization stocks, small cap, emerging markets, fixed income, real estate and commodities.
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Secular cycles are the long periods - as long as decades - that come to define each market era. These cycles alternate between long-term bull and bear markets.
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If you have read me for any length of time, you know I am less than enthralled with much of what passes for financial news.
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Often, investors will discover a manager after he's had a terrific run, usually when he lands on a magazine cover somewhere. Invariably, funds swell up with new investor money just before they revert to their long-term averages.
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When it comes to investing, you are your own worst enemy.
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Any time you speak to people about their posture, you learn about their most recent investment activity. When someone just bought stocks, they tend to be bullish; someone who just sold is bearish.
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The good news is that economists are intelligent, engaging and often charming folks. The bad news is their work is often of little use to investors.