Barry Ritholtz

“In the investment business, you must expect to be wrong.”

“Good investors must learn to contextualize the daily background noise.”

“In New York, the former lack of real competition allowed taxis to extract excessive charges, regardless of the poor service.”

“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.”

“Here is a dirty little secret: Stock-picking is wildly overrated. Sure, it makes for great cocktail party chatter, and what is more fun than delving into a company's new products? But the truth is that individual stocks are riskier than broad indices.”

“Once you research an idea, you begin to develop a perspective. Writing about anything in public, often in real time, has helped fashion my views.”

“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.”

“Google's founders have had a good eye for imagining what technologies will be significant in the near future. No one asked Google to develop self-driving cars, but it helped them with street views for Google Maps.”

“History is replete with examples of tech firms that were marginalized by new companies and technologies.”

“Have a well-thought financial plan that is not dependent upon correctly guessing what will happen in the future.”

“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.”

“Amongst the financial Twitterati, the term 'muppets' has come to describe any client used and abused by some financial predator. I've adopted the term to describe portfolios that have been assembled for purposes other than serving the clients' best interests.”

“We must recognize our own behavioral errors. To be blunt, you are not likely to become a cognitive Zen master anytime soon. But a little enlightenment could keep you from making some common investing errors.”

“Investors tend to discover 'hot' mutual fund managers just after a successful run and just before the inescapable force of mean reversion is about to kick in.”

“TV producers want ratings and are willing to do nearly anything to get them. They gin up artificial conflicts and create an urgency for even the most minor of economic data points.”

“The bottom line is this: Cash, in modest increments, has a role in any portfolio. But unless you are Warren Buffett, you should limit it to 2 or 3 percent.”