Foreword by Morgan Housel

I first heard of Barry Ritholtz in 2010. I was at an investing conference in Vancouver, Canada, where he was a keynote speaker.

Have you been to some of these conferences? The bar for speakers can be quite low, with a dry slog through 45 minutes of PowerPoint charts and self-promotion. The audience claps at the end because they are relieved.

But Barry. I’ll never forget Barry’s talk. It changed how I think about not just money, but communication.

It’s easy to forget, but for most of modern history financial commentary consisted of professional journalists who quoted experts. The experts themselves rarely had an opportunity to speak unfiltered, unedited, at length, for a big audience.

Barry was one of the first who did. I’ll date both of us by pointing out that he’s been blogging about investing since I was in high school. His Big Picture blog was years ahead of its time, and it upended how we now consume financial news for two reasons:

• It’s fun to read. Barry isn’t afraid to lay his opinion on the line even when it’s controversial. Better yet, he’s a storyteller. Presenting investing as a wild story about human behavior rather than a black hole of sterile data makes it something you look forward to. Historian David McCullough once pushed back on critics of “pop” history, saying, “No harm’s done to history by making it something someone would want to read.” Barry did that for finance.
• He knows what he’s talking about. As the founder of one of the fastest-growing wealth management firms in the United States, Barry’s views aren’t just chalkboard theories—he’s been in the trenches, so to speak, dealing with the wild, unpredictable nature of how real people respond to greed and fear. No one is always right, but you cannot accuse Barry of pontificating from an ivory tower.

The result is what so many people want and need out of financial commentary: The feeling that you’re having a casual beer with an experienced, wise, and honest friend.

Back in Vancouver, Barry spoke about being bearish on China—a controversial point at the time. Asked why, other speakers would launch into a garble of buzzwords and theories. Barry leaned into the mic and, in a whisper, told the audience, “Psst, they’re communists.”

What I love about Barry’s work is that he views investing as a game of emotions and behavior, rather than one driven by intelligence and data. That’s important, because a) it’s accurate and b) behavior is messy (if not sloppy), unpredictable, varies from person to person, and—unlike data—doesn’t pretend to offer a simple answer. Understanding how our behavior makes us do wrong can be more valuable than data purporting to show us how to do right.

This book offers just that, and I think you’ll enjoy it as much as I have.

Morgan Housel

Winter, 2025