BARRY RITHOLTZ’s new book “How Not to Invest” has received a warm reception. We talk about investing mistakes, the Trump Tariffs, and curating a good media diet.

https://youtu.be/pS4f45v2iRk

https://www.amazon.com/dp/1804091197/

“How Not To Invest” Transcript

Frazer Rice (00:03)
Welcome aboard, Barry.

Barry (00:04)
Well, thanks so much for having me, Frasier.

Frazer Rice (00:06)
Well, we are recording in the midst of chaos and disorder. We’re basically in day three, trading day three of the tariffs and trying to understand all of that. But back at the matter of hand, your new book, I read it really good. I thought it did a really good job of sort of colloquially putting some process and structure around not making bad investing decisions. Tell me a little bit about the impetus for the book.

Barry (00:35)
Sure, so the last book, Bailout Nation, was 15 years ago when I’ve had a lot of friends and family say, when’s the next book coming? And, you know, I had a little, like, hey, that was kind of a slog, stuff blowing up and forcing me to rewrite entire sections of the book every time some new company went belly up. And I came home from Christmas break from vacation.

You have that dead zone a few days before you’re back in the office January 2nd. And I just started thumbing through some old quarterly calls for clients and research notes and market commentaries. You know, I had moved the blog from GeoCities in the nineties to Typepad in the two thousands to WordPress in the 2010s. And so I was looking at some of these old things and like, God, I never revisited this.

This is such a great piece of research. I love this academic take on where alpha or even beta comes from. And I’m just kind of mulling it over. I start writing down chapter ideas on three by five cards like these. And I end up using this giant bulletin board on my wall. It just basically I start putting stuff up and I start rearranging them.

And pretty soon it becomes obvious. Hey, these ideas, a lot of them are don’ts. Don’t do this. Don’t do that. Avoid this. Try not to make this bad mistake. And ultimately, I kind of came to the conclusion that, know, we’ve part of the reason I held off writing a book is there have been tens of thousands of investing books telling people what to do. And we’re all pretty mediocre investors still.

Maybe it might be useful if we learned what not to do and thus “how not to invest” was born.

Frazer Rice (02:35)
We found kind of an interesting crucible to test all of this with sort of Trump’s tariff initiatives and a bunch of chaos on that front. As you think about what we’re living in right now with uncertainty, whether manufactured or not, what are some of the top things that you think about that you tell people, your clients and otherwise?

to keep in mind as we sort of weather this storm and try to learn a little bit about what the future is going to look like.

Barry (03:06)
Right. I had no idea what what the sequel would be named. Maybe it could be how not to run an economy or what we’ll play with that. But so so what’s happening these days are kind of fascinating because the first third of the book I spent a lot of time talking about how little we really know about about what’s happening right now. And we learn even less about the future. And so our

Frazer Rice (03:12)
Ha

Barry (03:34)
A hot take on these things is maybe we shouldn’t build portfolios based on having to predict where the economy is going to be, what the hot sector is going to be, where the hot geography is going to be, what the best companies are. Maybe we need to be a little more robust and capable of withstanding this. And the tariffs are a perfect example of how little we know. Look, the obvious examples of “How Not to Invest”

Nobody had heading into 2020 in their year had forecast global pandemic that shuts the world’s economy. And by the way, stocks go straight up. They just after a 34 percent crash, they go straight up from there. Nobody had that. Nobody had Russia invading it. Ukraine, Israel Hamas war, 500 basis points of Fed hiking, double digit losses in stocks and bonds in the same year. So when you look at all the annual predictions,

You would think we would be a little more humble, have a little more humility about this. And the ironic thing about what’s going on, I keep pointing to the television. The ironic thing about what’s going on is like this should have been completely foreseeable. It’s a failure of our own imaginations to imagine anyone would do this. Trump, for his whole adult career, has been enamored and enthusiastic about tariffs.

He calls himself Tariff Man. He ran on tariffs and he tried like half a dozen different rationales. We’ll protect domestic industry, we’ll protect our borders, we’ll reduce bad things coming into the country, we’ll get other countries to lower their tariffs and cover more of their own defense costs. Like he said all of this and collectively, and I include myself in this, nobody had the slightest idea that, and he will

Completely upend the world’s economic order. He will tear the band-aids off of long-standing allies and relationships and supply chains and all these things in pursuit of a goal that I don’t think a whole lot of people think makes a lot of sense and the market obviously Was wholly unprepared what we see going on now is simply the market saying hey

The price today is our expectation of profits and revenues a year forward times some multiple, which typically reflects collective psychology. And we thought the revenues and profits are going to be much higher. This new regime is going to make everything more expensive. It’s going to reduce consumer spending.

They’ll have less discretionary cash, less capex spending, less hiring. let’s ratchet our GDP expectations down, you know, 100, 200 basis points. And so it just goes to show you nobody knows what’s coming. Even after a presidential candidate says this is what I’m going to do. We still can’t wrap our heads around.

Frazer Rice (06:41)
One of the things I think too is, you know, I don’t really ascribe genius to Trump on anything, certainly not economically. I don’t even put it to him politically, but he is in the same sentence as P.T. Barnum as far as understanding ratings and media. And I…

Barry (06:55)
No, he’s a genius. I will tell you, he in his own way has an incredible feel for what excites the public. As did P.T. Barnum. He knows exactly how to get people enthusiastic. He knows how to craft a message. Just look at his performance in all the debates.

He has this incredibly intuitive sense of here’s how to catch people’s attention, keep their attention, and get them behind a story. Now, whether that story is rational or makes sense or, you know, forget even heterodoxy, whether it can be done, that’s another conversation. But credit where credit is due, he’s a communication genius. And you mentioned P.T. Barnum, another showman of the highest order. Trump is a brilliant

Showman, we can have another discussion about how effective he is as a steward of the economy and every time he’s won an election, he’s won against a weak unpopular candidate, both times a woman, he’s never been able to beat a man, he’s able to tap into

a certain angst and a certain anger that exists at a certain level of the country and it’s kind of fascinating. mean hold the disaster that is this past week aside. There is something fascinating about watching a master at work even if it’s towards ends that seem to really be damaging the US and global economy.

Frazer Rice (08:46)
Yeah, I mean the other part too is I mean he’s very good at declaring victory or jettisoning things that aren’t working very quickly and moving on and sometimes leaving a path of destruction in his wake that everyone else has to fix.

Barry (09:01)
No doubt about that and you know when you look at when you look at what’s been going on here They keep coming out like my best-case scenario here is no no this is a negotiating tactic There’ll be a whole bunch of side deals You know we’ll cut a deal with Israel because there’s a special relationship there and then something will happen with the UK and then Korea and Japan and before you know it like When we look at what’s going on now

No one really believes that we expect the trade deficit with Vietnam to be closed. I mean, if everybody in Vietnam spent every last penny of their salaries buying U.S. goods, it still wouldn’t close the trade deficit. Unless you’re going to get a Ford F-150 pickup truck, unless you’re get three of them purchased by every Vietnamese, that trade deficit’s never going to be closed. So…

It doesn’t make any sense. What was said on its face. We’re tariffing penguins in Antarctica. Like part of me, I am I am both bemused and comforted by that. Because it allows me to hold on to my wishful thinking that dear Lord, please let this be a negotiating tactic. We’re really not tariffing penguins. Are we?

Frazer Rice (10:26)
No, mean, part of it to me is it feels like that economically speaking, we’re firing Bill Walsh and hiring Woody Hayes to install the wishbone and then drafting a kicker in the first round and a punter in the second round. And I look at it and go, this wasn’t how I was brought up. And I’m not quite sure I ascribe that notion. How do you think about this in terms of the things you talk about in your book in terms of

I love the William Golding quote, nobody knows nothing and I subscribe to that too. I I feel like a lot of people are sort of opining on things that they are six or seven levels of abstraction away from and therefore, you know, it’s useless opinion. And then sort of taking data that we don’t understand and then getting all worried about things that they don’t really have a lot of control over. If you were just…sort of take someone right off the deck and say, you know, here’s some things to think about as you’re analyzing our current situation and “How Not to Invest.” What are you thinking about?

Barry (11:28)
So first and foremost, I’m thinking about what’s your time horizon? How long are you going to be investing? And hey, you my heart goes out to you if you’re retiring in 25 or 26, you you have a sequence of returns issue, you have a whole bunch of other problems. But if you just had a newborn and you’re saving money in a 529 for their college in 14, 16, 18 years, if you’re saving for retirement 10, 20, 30 years,

You have to be able to think long term and look to the other side of this. Right? So that’s one thing. The other thing is kind of watching, you know, humans were soft and chewy and delicious. We don’t have fangs or claws or armor. And so we had to evolve as a cooperative species.

We’re clever primates and working in a group we prevent getting picked off by leopards constantly. And so that cooperation has led to not only group dynamics, that’s very tribal, hey, our tribe has to be protect ourselves against that tribe. But you see that passed down, you know, a million years later, in partisan politics, or sports teams who you root for. And it’s kind of interesting watching the tribalism sort of unwind a little bit.

I keep I keep hearing some friends on the right. people think they know my politics. They really don’t. I’m pretty fiscally conservative, socially progressive, and a lot of people completely misread who I am and what I say because I just call it out as I see it. And that often angers people. But I’m shocked at the number of people who have been saying to me, hey, this this isn’t what I voted for.

I take a little perverse pleasure in telling that tribe, no, no, this is exactly what you voted for. Let’s stop kidding ourselves. We make decisions. They have ramifications. You built a lot of wishful thinking into your vote. By the way, this goes to the left and the right. It’s people frequently are not honest with themselves and to bring it back to investing. I love having conversations with people. Hey,

How do you think your portfolio is doing? What are your alternatives doing relative to the benchmark? How are you doing relative to your goals? How much risk have you assumed in this portfolio? And very often people really don’t know what they own. They don’t understand their risk profile. They don’t understand how well they’ve done. It’s kind of shocking, but wishful thinking and a little bit of self delusion goes a long way.

And again, it doesn’t matter if you’re Republican or Democrat, if you’re a value investor or growth investor. We all kind of, you know, fool ourselves into believing, hey, we’re all better looking, have more hair, way less, are more youthful in our mind’s eye than we are in reality. And the same bit of self-delusion applies to our portfolios and our major life decisions. And so, you know, part of the goal with the book was just getting people to

Hey, be honest with yourself, make sure you understand you know what you’re doing and why. And by the way, here are all the little mistakes that I’ve made along the way and it looks like you’re making them as well. Maybe if we can avoid those mistakes, we’d all be better off.

Frazer Rice (15:06)
As far as self-delusion goes, it reminds me of Garrison Killier and Lake Wobegon where all the kids are above average and everyone kind of thinks that about themselves and about the people they listen to or vote with. And then it gets into people having voice to have their opinion maybe outstretched the reach it should have. And you have people who think that they’re experts on viruses and then tariff policy and then the Monroe Doctrine and force majeure clauses and things like that.

Barry (15:11)
Ha

Frazer Rice (15:36)
stitching back to getting under control of your delusions, how do you curate your media diet so that you are taking in high quality information and using your valuable resources, in this case, some time and attention in a way that pulls you forward and helps you to think about things in a good way?

Barry (15:59)
Sure. A lot of stuff to unpack. Let’s start with the media diet. And if we want to get into epistemic trespass, we can address that a little later also. There’s an old joke, you know, when you’re young, you should read everything. And when you’re older, you should filter out everything. And there’s some basis for that. I started on a trading desk and I quickly figured out that sometimes what I read in the morning would affect how I traded. And so I would

Instead of reading this, I would just create a list and that was my reading on the way home at night. So I wanted to go in fresh and thoughtful without anybody else’s voice in my head because they don’t know my risk profile. They don’t know my goals. Why should I have some random journalist author fund manager? They shouldn’t be living rent free in my training brain. And so I started curating this list every day of what I wanted to read.

And I kind of found a couple of things. First, there were some people who were consistently thoughtful, that they had a process. It wasn’t just a spasmodic reaction to whatever the news of the moment was. That there was a framework for analyzing the world and that they were more right than wrong. Nobody is going to bet a thousand, but when they were wrong, they owned it and explained what they learned from the process.

And so that kind of became my own filter.

And I just started putting together sort of an all-star team of my favorite writers and people on TV and radio. They all have lived through a few cycles. They all have a defendable process. It’s not just dumb chance or luck. They all have a fairly rigorous analytical approach to thinking about markets and economics and risk capital and I tell everybody you should create your own all-star team.

By the way, this doesn’t mean get three million dollars and hire 20 of the smartest people. Their stuff is available for either free or relatively inexpensively. I list a dozen people in the book that are my favorites. That list could have been 20, 40, 80 people, but you kind of know them when you see them.

To paraphrase Powell’s quote on pornography. know it when I see it. know, Jonathan Miller and Bill McBride when it comes to real estate, one residential, one thinking about it nationally. Sam Rowe has a great concept of broad market structure. Jason Zweig and Morgan Housel on psychology. The list just goes on and on and on.

And by finding people I know and trust, they have a track record. I know I could take what they write and read it and not feel like this is going to make me crazy. This is going to get me emotionally enthusiastic. This is going to manufacture outrage. A big part of the problem with social media these days, or at least algorithmic social media.

I don’t find the same problem on blue sky that I see on tik tok, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram is, know, they they’ve run these giant a b tests, they’ve iterated the process of how do we get people? How do keep people engaged and clicking on links and looking at ads? Well, it turns out, piss them off, make them crazy manufacturer outrage, get them like, get that fight or flight response engaged.

And that’s how you end up sending your profits higher. So it’s also what makes social media so toxic. And it’s why a handful of countries have banned social media for children under 18. You know, we’re seeing a giant uptick in teenage suicides linked directly to social media. So it’s bad for your family. It’s bad for your portfolio. It’s bad for your mental health.

Other than that, you gotta love it. It’s just the greatest thing ever.

Frazer Rice (20:22)
Let’s take for a moment, you had a great chapter in “How Not to Invest” talking about a billionaire or close to billionaire family making the same mistakes that maybe the retail investor makes in terms of letting their analysis sort of outstrip their expertise and making a variety of different bad investments. What do you see in that world? What is it that the wealthy do that is also a mistake that other investors do?

Barry (20:50)
So let’s start out by saying on a day like today or this week where like year to date markets are now down almost 20 percent. In reality it doesn’t affect their standard of living and it doesn’t affect the quality of life. Maybe this is a little uncomfortable but I used to ask a joke of some of our wealthy clients what’s the difference between one billion dollars and two billion dollars?

And the answer is really isn’t any difference. It’s not gonna you could do whatever the hell you want Go wherever you want fly private, but maybe you can only buy 20 monies instead of 10 monies If you have a billion dollar, but other than that like really there’s no difference So first we have to really be careful when we compare ourselves to billionaires their choices their risk tolerance their goals their profile very different than ours and I I really despise all those here’s

Here’s what this billionaire does before lunch. Right. Well, good for them. know, for a middle class family with a half a million to a million dollars in savings, down 20 % is disastrous for whatever they’re saving for now. The market will eventually come back. But hey, if you’re retiring now or if your kid starts college in September, Jesus, this sucks. You’re 529 that you’ve been saving 15 years. Suddenly it’s a fifth lower.

Frazer Rice (21:47)
All right.

Barry (22:13)
You better hope they’re not going to a five-year school. It’s only a four-year school because you just lost the fifth year of funding. So that’s really problematic. But where the parallels are, so that’s the differences, where the parallels are is people are people. know, every now and then I have a discussion with folks about foundations and institutions and endowments. Hey, bad news, they’re run by human beings.

And they’re subject to the exact same foibles and cognitive errors that we all make. There’s just no way around it. So I use the not well endowed joke about Harvard. The billionaire trifecta from hell was a presentation I used to give that was so much fun. The audience reaction was so much fun, I had to turn it into a chapter.

And so many years ago I gave a presentation to I think it was tiger 21 and I challenged the room with everybody supposedly in that worth of over I don’t remember if it was 20 million or whatever it was way back then and Hey, you don’t know what you’re holding. You don’t know what your performance is You don’t know how that performance is relative to a benchmark ton of pushback And so I challenged everybody right down right now. What are your five biggest holdings? What?

How have you done year to date? Wht about last year? How did each of those funds perform relative to their benchmark? Write it down right now. And, you know, a month later, I’m getting emails from people. my God, I can’t believe you were right. was wrong. Fast forward to this presentation. Story about this very successful family. The dad came here just before World War Two started and ends up being wildly successful.

uh, the belphers they they belfer petroleum eventually they get bought and then Rebought and you know the company he continues to run each time every time the company gets bought He becomes the president of new company until houston oil and gas buys him He eventually retires his son joins the board of houston oil and gas better known as enron And when enron starts to wobble 15 years later, um, he just rides it down two billion dollars down to nothing

Hey, you know, managing our money ourselves is kind of a problem. Let me find somebody who can help us. So they find a guy, long story short, Bernie Madoff. By the way, there’s a semi happy ending to this. After Bernie Madoff blows up, you know, maybe this whole stock thing is not for us. And so they rotate into this newfangled crypto when they give the money to FTX and Sam Brankman Fried. So I call that the trifecta from hell.

Enron, Bernie Madoff, FTX. The good news is 96 % of the Madoff monies were recovered. That’s the initial investment you put in, not the fake returns Madoff claimed. And with FTX, it was, I think it’s like 115 or 120 % returns. They just keep finding money. There was combing of funds, totally unacceptable, and money all over the place they just weren’t keeping track of. And a couple of

AI investments that worked out well. So they recovered more than the starting point with that. But the takeaway is if you’re to do it yourself, you have to know what the hell you’re doing. You have to be thoughtful about it. You can’t be super concentrated in one stock. We see that time and again throughout the books. Second, if you’re to trust somebody else, you really have to do your due diligence and find a person that, you know, there has to be ordered returns. The process has to make sense.

A number of people looked at the madoff split strike option underwriting and it turns out there aren’t enough stock options in the world to cover what he was doing and it didn’t take a whole lot of I know a number of people who in real time the more famous ones were Jim Simons looked at it and said something smells wrong here and who wrote the how to beat the dealer and how to beat the market

Frazer Rice (26:31)
Charles Ellis?

Barry (26:32)
L not Charles Ellis. his name will pop into my head. He turned out to have, figured out, it was a problem. How, beat the dealer, the dealer. I’ll tell you exactly who that was. of course it was Ed Thorpe. How do I not remember Ed Thorpe’s name? so anyway, you gotta do your homework. And third, if you’re going to roll into some new products, be aware that most new products don’t work out.

Even the products that do work out the vast majority of them are not great you know the I quote Ted Sturgeon in the book who a science fiction writer from the 40s 50s 60s. He was always defending the genre against people said why is so much science fiction junk and his answer was 90 % of everything is crap and that’s true for hedge funds and private equity and mutual funds and ETFs and specs and podcasts.

And, you know, if you could get into the top decile, great, knock yourself out. But if you’re this newfangled thing comes out, you’re taking a risk on it, especially. And this is what’s so ironic. If you’re a billionaire, you’ve already won. You get to stop playing the game. This shit shouldn’t matter to you down, you know, 5%,

3 days in a row should be irrelevant because the whole purpose of investing towards a goal is that here’s my objective and here’s the path I’m going to take to get to that objective and what we have learned about human nature is if you can reach your goal with less stress, less volatility, less drawdown, hey, you’ll enjoy the ride more.

Some of us, you know, and I credit this to my trading desk days, days like this, you know, I’m looking for down 20 % to deploy more capital. I’m excited about that. Most people want to throw up in the nearest waste paper basket because it’s nauseating. So for, if you aren’t, you know, wired in a weird way and the opportunity that these dislocations create don’t get you excited.

Well then create a portfolio that isn’t going to be this volatile. That’s not going to be up and down. It’s not going to be single stock based as we saw with that example with Enron. Just figure out what your goals are. I’m always surprised how many really wealthy people and I don’t mean middle class wealthy upper middle class you know a house and a vacation property and a couple million dollars in the bank.

I mean 50, 100, $500 million. Hey, you’ve already won. Ring the bell, throttle back and enjoy your life. Even if you want to keep working. Warren Buffett, know, Charlie Munger worked up until his dying day. If you want to keep working, great. But why have so much stress in your life if this sort of stuff causes you stress?

Frazer Rice (29:47)
Great stuff. Barry, how do we find the book?

Barry (29:49)
So how not to invest book dot com if you want to learn more about it, but it’s out everywhere. Barnes and Noble, Amazon Books a million wherever you find your favorite books. It’s there in both hardcover, audible and e-book reader. It’s it’s there for the taking. Have have have fun at it. At the end of the book, I include an email address where I tell people, hey, if I left a lot of stuff unclear or ambiguous,

Let me know about it and I’ll see if I can resolve that either in an email or perhaps in the next edition.

Frazer Rice (30:26)
stuff. Thanks Barry.

Barry (30:28)
Thank you, Fraser.

Barry’s Comments on the Book

The challenge in writing “How NOT to Invest” was organizing a large number of ideas, many of which were only loosely connected, into something coherent, understandable, and, most importantly, readable.

It took a while of playing around with the concepts, but eventually, I hit on a structure that I found enormously useful: I organized our biggest impediments to investing success into three broad categories: “Bad Ideas,” “Bad Numbers,” and “Bad Behavior.”

That insight greatly simplified my task of making the book both fun to read and helpful for anyone interested in investing.

Here is a broad overview of each of the 10 main sections, which can help you quickly grasp the key ideas in the book.

Bad Ideas:

1. Poor Advice: Why is there so much bad advice? The short answer is that we give too much credit to gurus who self-confidently predict the future despite overwhelming evidence that they can’t. We believe successful people in one sphere can easily transfer their skills to another – most of the time, they can’t. This is as true for professionals as it is for amateurs; it’s also true in music, film, sports, television, and economic and market forecasting.

2. Media Madness: Do we really need 24/7 financial advice for our investments we won’t draw on for decades? Why are we constantly prodded to take action now! when the best course for our long-term financial health is to do nothing? What does the endless stream of news, social media, TikToks, Tweets, magazines, and television do to our ability to make good decisions? How can we re-engineer our media consumption to make it more useful to our needs?

3. Sophistry: The Study of Bad Ideas: Investing is really the study of human decision-making. It is about the art of using imperfect information to make probabilistic assessments about an inherently unknowable future. This practice requires humility and the admission of how little we know about today and essentially nothing about tomorrow. Investing is simple but hard, and therein lies our challenge.

Bad Numbers:

4. Economic Innumeracy: Some individuals experience math anxiety, but it only takes a bit of insight to navigate the many ways numbers can mislead us. It boils down to context. We are too often swayed by recent events. We overlook what is invisible yet significant. Instinctively, we struggle to grasp compounding. We evolved in an arithmetic world, so we are unprepared for the exponential math of finance.

5. Market Mayhem: As investors, we often rely on rules of thumb that fail us. We don’t fully understand the importance of long-term societal trends. We view valuation as a snapshot in time instead of recognizing how it evolves over a cycle, driven primarily by changes in investor psychology. Markets possess a duality of rationality and emotion, which can be perplexing; however, once we understand this, volatility and drawdowns become easier to accept.

6. Stock Shocks: Academic research and data overwhelmingly reveal that stock selection and market timing do not work. The vast majority of market gains come from ~1% of all stocks. It’s extremely difficult to identify these stocks in advance and even harder to avoid the other 99% of stocks. Our best strategy is to invest in all of them through a broad index. Some terrible trades are illustrative of this truth.

Bad Behavior:

7. Avoidable Mistakes: Everyone makes investing mistakes, and the wealthy and ultra-wealthy make even bigger ones. We don’t understand the relationship between risk and reward; we fail to see the benefits of diversification. Our unforced errors haunt our returns.

8. Emotional Decision-Making: We make spontaneous decisions for reasons unrelated to our portfolios. We mix politics with investing. Emotionally, we focus on outliers while ignoring the mundane. We exist in a happy little bubble of self-delusion, which is only popped in times of panic.

9. Cognitive Deficits: You’re human – unfortunately, that hurts your portfolio. Our brains evolved to keep us alive on the savannah, not to make risk/reward decisions in the capital markets. We are not particularly good at metacognition—the self-evaluation of our own skills. Second, we can be misled by individuals whose skills in one area do not transfer to another. Third, we prefer narratives over data. When facts contradict our beliefs, we tend to ignore those facts and reinforce our ideology. Our brains simply weren’t designed for this.

Good Advice:

10. This is the best advice I can offer:

A. Avoid mistakes (fewer unforced errors, be less stupid).

B. Recognize your advantages (and take advantage of them).

C. Create a financial plan (then stick to it). If you need help, find someone who is a fiduciary to work with.

D. Index (mostly). Own a broad set of low-cost equity indices for the best long-term results.

E. Own bonds for income and to offset stock volatility. Primarily Treasuries, investment-grade corporates, munis, and TIPs.

F. Be tax-aware. Consider direct indexing to reduce capital gains and reduce concentrated positions.

G. Use a regret minimization strategy when sitting on outsized single position gains.

H. Be skeptical of all but the best alts (VC/PE/HF/PC). If you have access to the top decile, take advantage of it. Otherwise, exercise caution.

I. Spend your money intelligently: Buy time, experiences, and joy. Ignore the scolds.

J. Fail better. Understand what is and is NOT in your control.

K. Get rich: Here are the classic strategies to get rich in the markets, including how difficult each is and their likelihood of success.

***

I was just discussing the idea with Morgan Housel and Craig Pierce — “Is this anything?” — and now it is the day it arrives! (Hardcover and ebook are published today; Audible audio version is out tomorrow).

How did that happen so quickly…?

You can order it in your favorite formats in the US, UK, or around the world. If you want to learn more before putting down your hard-earned cash, check this wide array of discussions, podcasts, reviews, and mentions.

This book was a joy to put together, and I have been delighted at the response it has received! Please let me know what you think of it at HNTI at Ritholtz Wealth dotcom.

Barry’s Masters in Business Podcast on Bloomberg

Barry’s Colleague, Nick Maggiuli

https://www.amazon.com/Wealth-Actually-Intelligent-Decision-Making-1-ebook/dp/B07FPQJJQT/