RCM Review: How Not to Invest

I know, I know, I am torturing you with book stuff. This will run its course over the next few weeks and months…

There are lots of reviews trickling in, and I want to share one from someone you may not be familiar with: John Tamny of Real Clear Markets.

“From the introduction right on through the final page, Ritholtz is clear that his book “is designed to reduce mistakes – your mistakes – with money.” The latter is crucial exactly due to Ritholtz’s empirically correct view that one needn’t be a great or market-beating investor to have a happy retirement as much as one must avoid the errors that sap the genius of compound returns. Slow and steady wins the race, or something like that.

What’s fun is that while Ritholtz is preaching a very conservative investing style, his own style of writing and communicating ideas is anything but. Put another way, Ritholtz is fun.

Plainly a fan of movies, music and books, Ritholtz makes a powerful case against individual stock portfolio building via the classic William Goldman line about Hollywood: “no one knows anything.” But rather than solely quote Goldman and Goldman’s own experience as a screenwriter to make a case about an opaque business future, Ritholtz expands on how Goldman came to conclude “no one knows anything” with all sorts of lively anecdotes found in his own reading. It turns out all but one studio passed on Raiders of the Lost Ark, Columbia Pictures chose to make Starman instead of E.T. while passing on Back to the Future altogether, and 20th Century Fox allowed George Lucas to take a 70% salary cut ahead of making a little film called Star Wars in return for “merchandize and sequel rights” to the franchise…”

Check out the entire review to get a full sense of the book…

Source:
Book Review: Barry Ritholtz’s Excellent ‘How Not to Invest’
By John Tamny
Real Clear Markets, March 20, 2025

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