Finance
Investors will be ‘miles ahead’ if they avoid these 3 things: expert
Barry Ritholtz
Barry Ritholtz
Barry Ritholtz had a hard time writing his first book, “Bailout Nation.”
Drafted in the midst of the 2008 financial crisis, the biggest challenge, he said, was that a different company “would blow up” every week.
It felt as if the writing “was never over,” said Ritholtz, the chairman and chief investment officer of Ritholtz Wealth Management, an investment advisory firm that manages more than $5 billion of assets.
By comparison, the new book was a “joy” to write, largely due to the benefit hindsight, said Ritholtz, who is also a prolific blogger and creator of the long-running finance podcast “Masters in Business.”
The book, “How Not to Invest: The Ideas, Numbers, and Behaviors That Destroy Wealth — And How to Avoid Them,” published March 18, is a history lesson of sorts.
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Ritholtz looks back at anecdotes across pop culture and finance — touching on Hollywood titans like Steven Spielberg, music sensations like The Beatles, and corporate pariahs like Elizabeth Holmes of Theranos — to illustrate the disconnect between how much people think they know and what they actually know. (Ritholtz’ point being, The Beatles and films like “Raiders of the Lost Ark” were initially panned; Holmes, initially lauded, is now serving jail time.)
“It’s a huge advantage to say, ‘I know how the game ended,'” Ritholtz said. “What the analysts were saying in the second, third, fourth inning, they didn’t know what they’re talking about.”
CNBC spoke to Ritholtz about why people are often bad investors, why famous investors like Warren Buffett are “mutants,” and why financial advice about buying $5 lattes is the cliché that just won’t die.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
How to be ‘miles ahead of your peer investors’
Greg Iacurci: Your No. 1 tip to being a better investor is to avoid mistakes — or, as you write, “make fewer unforced errors.” What are some of the most damaging unforced errors you often see?
Barry Ritholtz: Let’s take one from three broad categories: Bad ideas, bad numbers and bad behaviors.
Bad ideas are simply, wherever you look, people want to tell you what to do with your money. It’s a fire hose of stuff. Everybody is selling you some bulls*** or another. And we really need to be a little more skeptical.
On the numbers side, the biggest [mistake] is simply: We fail to understand how powerful compounding is. A lot of the dumb things we do get in the way of that compounding. Cash is not a store of value. It’s a medium of exchange, and you shouldn’t hold on to cash for very long. It should always be in motion, meaning you should be paying for your rent or mortgage with it, paying your bills and your taxes, whatever recreational stuff you want to do, whatever philanthropy you want to do and whatever investing you want to do. But money shouldn’t just sit around.
Compounding is exponential. When I ask people, “If I’d invested $1,000 in 1917 in the stock market, what’s it worth today?” You look at what the market’s returned — 8% to 10%, with dividends reinvested — $1,000 a century later is worth $32 million. And people simply can’t believe it. Ten percent [reinvested dividends] means the money doubles every 7.2 years.
The biggest [behavioral error] is simply, we make emotional decisions. That immediate emotional response never has a good outcome in the financial markets. It is exactly why people chase stocks and funds up and buy high, and why they get scared and panic out and sell low.
If you just avoid those three things, you’re miles ahead of your peer investors.
Not all plays are ‘Hamilton’
GI: Going back to something you mentioned about how relentless bad financial advice is, what are some memorably bad pieces of financial advice or investment opportunities you’ve come across?
BR: I get a lot of weird things — plays, restaurants. You should know, most plays are not “Hamilton” and most restaurants are not Nobu. These are really, really difficult investments. Those are all the winners. You’re not seeing the other million products in the same space that didn’t make it.
I think we have this really distorted viewpoint of the world that allows us to believe that finding a giant winner is much easier than it really is. And that is because you don’t see the endless fails, the restaurants that implode, the plays that close after opening night. All these little investment opportunities that come along, and the people selling [them], the advice they’re giving, they’re always weird and quirky. A great restaurant is a really good business, but most restaurants are terrible businesses, and that’s a hard thing for people to recognize.
The financial ‘cliché that refuses to die’
GI: There’s this great part in the book where you talk about the $5 coffee: The thought being, if you invest that money instead of buying coffee, you’ll basically be a millionaire. You write that it’s the “cliché that refuses to die.” Why do you think it’s detrimental for people to think this way?
BR: $5, really? I don’t want to come across as a completely detached one percenter, but if a $5 latte is the difference between you having a comfortable retirement or not, you’ve done something very, very wrong.
Let’s say you do put $5 away. If you saved $5 every day and invested it, it adds up to something. But when you look out 20, 30, 40, years, the other side of the spending equation is, what’s my income going to be? How much am I going to earn? If you’re going to show me $5 compounding over 30 years, you also have to show me where my income is going to be. If I’m looking at this as a 30-year-old, what’s my income going to be at 60? How will my portfolio, my 401(k) — and if I have kids, my 529 [college savings] plan — how will that have compounded over the same time? If you’re only looking at the $5 latte but ignoring everything else — and that’s before we even get to inflation — it looks like a chunk of money but it really isn’t.
The big philosophical problem that I’ve found is most of the spending scolds don’t understand what the purpose of money is.
GI: What is the purpose of money?
BR: Money is a tool. First, lack of money certainly creates stress. You can worry about paying the bills, and if you have a kid, how am I going to pay for their health care? Not having sufficient money to pay the rent, buy food, pay for health care, is certainly stressful. The first thing money does is it chases away the lack-of-money blues.
Everybody is selling you some bulls*** or another. And we really need to be a little more skeptical.
Money [also] creates optionality. It gives you choices. It gives you freedom. It allows you to not do many of the things you don’t want to do. And it allows you to buy time with friends and family experiences and to create memories.
It’s the ability to spend your time how you want, with who you want, doing whatever work you want, or no work at all, if you eventually get to that point.
GI: What should people do to make investing as simple as possible and have good outcomes?
BR: [Vanguard Group founder] Jack Bogle figured this out 50 years ago. If you want to find the needle in the haystack — if you want to find the Apples, Amazons, Microsofts, Nvidias, J.P. Morgans, United Healthcares and Berkshires [of the world] — don’t look for the needle in the haystack. Just buy the whole haystack. (Editor’s note: The “haystack” here refers to buying an index fund that tracks the broad stock market rather than trying to pick winners.)
You make the core part of your portfolio a broad index, and then you put whatever you want around it.
So, start out with a basic index, be very tax-aware of what you do, and then back to the behavioral stuff: Don’t interfere with the market’s ability to compound.
The crazy thing about Warren Buffett: His wealth has doubled over the past seven years. Think about how insane that is. He’s 94, like half of his wealth came about from zero to [his late eighties], and the other half came about in the last seven years. That’s the miracle of compounding.
Cybersecurity and enterprise software stocks have been market dogs in 2026, with fears that AI will wipe out a wide range of companies in the enterprise space dominating the narrative. But they snapped a brutal losing streak this past week, joining in the broader market rally that saw all losses from the U.S.-Iran war regained by the Dow Jones Industrial Average and S&P 500.
Cybersecurity has been “a victim of some of the AI-related headlines,” Christian Magoon, Amplify ETFs CEO, said on this week’s “ETF Edge.”
It wasn’t just niche cybersecurity names. Take Microsoft, for example, which was recently down close to 20% for the year. Its shares surged last week by 13%.
A big driver of the pummeling in software stocks was a rotation within tech by investors to AI infrastructure and semiconductors and some other names in large-cap tech, Magoon said, and since cybersecurity stocks and ETFs are heavily weighted towards software companies, they were left behind even as those businesses continue to grow on a fundamental basis.
But Wall Street now has become more bullish with the stocks at lower levels. Brent Thill, Jefferies tech analyst, said last week that the worst may be over for software stocks. “I think that this concept that software is dead, and then Anthropic and OpenAI are going to kill the entire industry, is just over-exaggerated,” he said on CNBC’s “Money Movers” on Wednesday.
“Big Short” investor Michael Burry wrote in a Substack post on Wednesday that he is becoming bullish about software stocks after the recent selloff. “Software stocks remain interesting because of accelerated extreme declines last week arising from a reflexive positive feedback loop between falling software stocks and changes in the market for their bank debt,” he wrote.
The Global X Cybersecurity ETF (BUG), is down about 12% since the beginning of the year, with top holdings including Palo Alto Networks, Fortinet, Akamai Technologies and CrowdStrike. But BUG was up 12% last week. The First Trust NASDAQ Cybersecurity ETF (CIBR) is down 6% for the year, but up 9% in the past week.
Piper Sandler analyst Rob Owens reiterated an “overweight” rating on Palo Alto Networks which helped the stock pop 7% — it is now down roughly 6% on the year. Its peers saw similar moves, including CrowdStrike.
Performance of Global X cybersecurity ETF versus S&P 500 over past one-year period.
Magoon said expectations may have become too high in cybersecurity, and with a crowding effect among investors, solid results were not enough to to push stocks higher. But the down-and-then-back-up 2026 for the sector is also a reminder that when stocks fall sharply in a short period of time, opportunity may knock.
“Once you’re down over 10% in some of these subsectors, you start to see the contrarians start to say, ‘well, maybe I’ll take a look at this,'” Magoon said.
He said AI does add both opportunity and uncertainty to the cybersecurity equation, increasing demand but also introducing new competition. But he added, “I think the dip is good to buy in an AI-driven world,” specifically because the risks to companies may lead to more M&A in cyber names that benefits the stocks.
For now, investors may look for opportunity on the margins rather than rush back into beaten-up tech names. “I think investors are still going to remain underweight software,” Thill said.
But Magoon advises investors to at least take the reminder to keep an eye on niches in the market during pronounced downturns. “The best-performing are often the least bought and do the best over the next 12 months versus late-in-the-game piling on,” he said.
While that may have been a mindset that worked against the last investors into cybersecurity and enterprise software in mid-2025 when the negative sentiment started building, at least for now, it’s started working for the stocks in the sector again.
Meanwhile, this year’s biggest winner is also a good example of what can be an extended trade in either a bullish or bearish direction. Last year, institutional ownership of energy was at multi-year lows, Magoon said, referencing Bank of America data. “Reverse sentiment can be a great indicator,” he said.
But he cautioned that any selective buying of stocks that have dipped does have to contend with the risk that there is a potentially bigger drawdown in the market yet to come in 2026. That is because midterm election years historically have been marked by large drawdowns. “If you think it is bad right now, it could get a lot worse,” Magoon said. But he added that there’s a silver-lining in that data, too, for the patient investor. The market has posted very strong 12-month returns after midterm election drawdowns end. So, for investors with a longer-term time horizon and no need for short-term liquidity, Magoon said, “stick in there.”
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New innovation in the exchange-traded fund industry could come at a cost to investors during extreme conditions.
According to MFS Investment Management’s Jamie Harrison, ETFs involved in increasingly complex derivatives and less transparent markets may be in uncharted territory when it comes to violent downturns.
“Those would be something that you’d want to keep an eye on as volatility ramps up,” the firm’s head of ETF capital markets told CNBC’s “ETF Edge” this week. “As innovation continues to increase at a rapid pace within the ETF wrapper, [it’s] definitely something that we advise our clients to be really front-footed about… Lack of transparency could absolutely be an issue if we’re going to start seeing some deep sell-offs.”
His firm has been around since 1924 and is known for inventing the open-end mutual fund. Last year, ETF.com named MFS Investment Management as the best new ETF issuer.
“It’s important to do due diligence on the portfolio,” he said. “Having a firm that has deep partnerships, deep bench of subject matter experts that plays with the A-team in terms of the Street and liquidity providers available [are] super important.”
Liquidity as the real issue?
Harrison suggested the real issue is liquidity, particularly during a steep sell-off.
“We’ve all seen the news and the headlines around potential private credit ETFs. That picture becomes much more murky,” he added. “It’s up to advisors, to investors [and] to clients to really dig in and look under the hood and engage with their issuers.”
He noted investors will have to ask some tough questions.
“What does this look like in a 20% drawdown? How does this liquidity facility work? Am I going to be able to get in? Am I going to be able to get out? And if I’m able to get out, am I able to get out at a price that’s tight to NAV [net asset value], and what’s the infrastructure at your shop in terms of managing that consideration for me,” said Harrison.
Amplify ETFs’ Christian Magoon is also concerned about these newer ETF strategies could weather a monster drawdown. He listed private credit as a red flag.
“If your ETF owns private credit, I think it’s worth taking a look at, kind of what the standards are around liquidity and how that ETF is trading, because that should be a bit of a mismatch between the trading pace of ETFs and the underlying asset,” the firm’s CEO said in the same interview.
Magoon also highlighted potential issues surrounding equity-linked notes. The notes provide fixed income security while offering potentially higher returns linked to stocks or equity indexes.
“Those could potentially be in stress due to redemptions and the underlying credit risk. That’s another kind of unique derivative,” Magoon said. “I would very closely look at any ETF that has equity-linked notes should we get into a major drawdown or there be a contagion in private credit or something related to the banking system.”
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