• I’m Not Convinced The AI Bubble Exists: The AI bubble is a speculative concept that the AI industry is extremely over-valued. If true, the value of most companies involved in AI (several of whom are worth well over a trillion dollars) will collapse, devastating the entire economy. I think that there’s a pretty realistic chance that the meteoritic growth of AI companies in the past few years is justified, and that they have even more room for growth. ​There is a realistic chance the meteoric growth of AI companies is justified, with room left to run. He treats the huge spending as sky-high but constrained. (Matteo Raso)

• The wealthiest 10% of Americans are pulling ahead of everyone else. This is what’s making them richer. The wealthiest 10% have a median net worth that is $800,000 greater than it was three years ago. Venessa Wong on the Fed’s latest Survey of Consumer Finances: from 2022 to 2025, real median net worth rose 2% for the typical American but 19% for the top decile, whose median is $800,000 higher than three years ago. Having assets, not earning more, is what separated the winners. (Marketwatch)

• There’s a Reason Elon Musk’s Cybertruck Never Took. Off Actually, there are a few: Matthew DeBord: Musk posted Friday that Cybertruck production winds down in mid-2027 to free up Austin capacity for the Cybercab, a pedal-less, wheel-less robotaxi. Few vehicles were as widely unloved; fewer than 75,000 of Musk’s pickups have been sold, a number that is all the more disappointing when you consider that Tesla’s Austin factory was set up to produce 250,000 trucks a year. That might have something to do with the fact that the originally promised price tag was $40,000, also an undershoot of reality: Currently, the base truck is $82,490. ​(Slate)

• The Spiral: A three-year analysis of new bettors shows who sportsbooks really depend on, and what it costs them. The least active two-thirds of licensed sportsbook gamblers account for just 2.7% of estimated revenue, according to a Bloomberg Businessweek analysis of almost 140,000 bettors across 29 states in 2024 and ’25. (Businessweek)

• Could the Voter Backlash Against A.I. Actually Help the Economy? Voter backlash could threaten the data center boom. Some economists think that could be a good thing. ​Colby Smith on the AI boom carrying the economy through tariffs and war, but also what pushed up prices and borrowing costs and stoked bubble fears. Slowing the build-out could make it more sustainable. (New York Times)

• ‘Sniff’ and ‘Smell’: Making Sense of Scent: Olfactory battle lines sharpen in wartime. The Viet Cong could detect U.S. soldiers by their soap and aftershave. Kathryn Hughes reviews Will Tullett’s Sniff: less than a century ago the poor smelled poor, the sick smelled sick and the wealthy moved in a cloud of expensive perfume.  (Wall Street Journal)

• There Are Too Many Apps for That: An extraordinary number of vibe-coded apps are flooding the market. Is anyone actually using them? Alexandra Tremayne-Pengelly: the defining feature of AI slop is volume, and vibe coders are now clogging the App Store with it. (The Atlantic)

• What’s missing from every story about Tuesday’s anti-Trump rout: The coverage pins the wipeout on the Iran war and gas prices, but roughly half the electorate has been angry since November 2024. The piece points to the No Kings marches, an estimated seven million people on October 18, 2025 and eight million-plus on March 28. Meanwhile, many if not most normal Americans were having a normal reaction to Trump’s behavior and actions: They were revolted, and angry, and scared. But did you ever see diner interviews with people who opposed Trump, or feature stories on them? Did you hear their voices regularly reflected in the coverage? No, you didn’t. The media pretty much ignored their presence in the polity. ​ (Press Watch)

• Republicans Learn X Is the Echo Chamber: It turns out you can’t post Malfoids and Anakin when diesel is $6 a gallon and expect America to vote for you. ​404 Media: BlazeTV posted a victory-lap video on Nov. 2 about the young right reclaiming culture, the day before Democrats swept the midterms. The online right has set the political narrative for a decade, and the piece argues it was talking to itself. Musk spent roughly half a billion on the election and his candidates lost. (404)/ see also ‘A global political awakening’: how gen Z protests are sweeping the world: Ashifa Kassam on young people from Serbia to Bangladesh and India to France pushing back against authoritarianism and reshaping political landscapes. Brazil’s movement rallied online by the millions; Serbia’s cyclists and ultramarathoners made headlines. (The Guardian)

• The $265 Million Quarterback Who’s Somehow a Bargain: Brock Purdy went from last pick of the NFL draft to a $53 million annual salary. For the Super Bowl-contending San Francisco 49ers, he’s still worth every penny.​ He just signed a five-year, $265 million extension at $53 million a year. Eight quarterbacks make more and 14 cost more against the cap. The 49ers are 7-1, and he has the highest career passer rating among QBs with 1,500 attempts. (Wall Street Journal)

Video of the day: Why Can Humans Eat Almost Anything When Most Animals Can’t (Murph)

Be sure to check out our Masters in Business with Ann Berry, founder and Managing Partner of Threadneedle, an operating and capital advisory platform providing strategic guidance, operating support, and capital to high-growth private companies and investment platforms. She is also General Partner of the Threadneedle Opportunity Fund, investing in data analytics, AI, and web3 companies at the seed stage alongside Alexis Ohanian’s venture firm, 776. Berry also hosts After Earnings, Morning Brew’s interview podcast with public-company CEOs/CFOs.

How to tell if your Girlfriend is a Spy

Source: Random Trading Desks

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The post 10 Tuesday AM Reads appeared first on The Big Picture.

Investors, especially the financial press, spend a lot of time trying to explain what just happened. The problem is that this exercise is filled with hindsight bias, causal assumptions, and narrative fallacy that don’t withstand scrutiny.

Last week was a perfect example of that. I want to take a contrarian view of what happened Thursday to suss out what we do and don’t know, and what might have been driving all of the volatility.

1. The Sell-Off

Thursday was one of the most significant one-day sell-offs we have seen in a long while. The Philadelphia Semiconductor Index plunged 12%, with some names like SanDisk, AMD, Micron, and Marvell falling much more. Reuters noted it was the second-worst day for semiconductors on record.

The S&P 500 fell 4.4% — the worst drop since the tariffs announcement in April 2025 (“Liberation Day”). The Nasdaq, which had hit an all-time high in October, fell ~12% below that mark. The Volatility Index reflected this; the VIX saw its third-largest percentage jump ever, gaining 69.7% as it leaped from 16 to over 28.

Perhaps most significant was Nvidia, which is now negative for the year. The heaviest weight in the S&P 500, it fell 9.3% that day. How widely known Jensen Huang’s now-publicized affair with a Chinese Spy is undetermined.1

2. Unlikely Causes

The “Blunami”, a Democratic landslide victory on Tuesday, was well understood early election night (November 3rd), well before midnight. Despite the substantial rally the day after the election, a new narrative began by the end of Thursday.

This was all known on the day after the election (Wednesday, November 4th). It was a historically strong post-midterm election rally. Markets rose, and if you want a theory why, there were plenty: anticipation of an end to the Iran war, lower gas prices, lower inflation – maybe even future rate cuts. Of course, congressional gridlock is always a winning theme.

President Trump also surprised people by accepting the election outcome. The historical thumping was so great, it would have been laughable to claim otherwise. Whatever the reason, it led to the market’s best day in three months.

Thursday more than erased those gains, yet nothing new emerged from the election results. Indeed, markets rallied hard the next day (Friday) and, despite the Jensen Huang/Nvidia news, were up strongly at noon today.

No significant political news emerged between late Tuesday night and now. This makes the dominant AP storyline look like a lazy narrative fallacy, an attempt to fit the results into a superficial storyline. The AP timeline makes no sense and strongly suggests the dominant Associated Press narrative is bullshit.

3. Three Possible Causes

Several potential drivers of the selloff resonate more with me than the political narrative.

The first was rumors about a forced liquidation of data center loans. Bloomberg covered one side of the story mid-day: “Mystery Seller Puts Up $500 Million Data Center Loans”; this aligns with a reversal in bullish sentiment. The next day, it was revealed that the seller was ING.2

Given the hundreds of billions already invested by the hyperscalers in the AI data center buildout, half a billion dollars is a modest sum and should not be enough debt to cause widespread panic.

While I do not believe this was the cause, sometimes, all it takes to ignite a room full of flammable gas is a small spark.

The second possible culprit was the rebalancing of the (too) popular leveraged ETFs of an estimated $50 billion.3 Dave Nadig of ETF.com puts the daily rebal at ~$58 billion; he notes this does not include flow, and that the day’s volatility adds to the magnitude (but is agnostic about the direction). The ETF rebal was more likely a result of the sell-off, and not an underlying cause.

The third potential cause – and in my mind, the most significant – was a huge, leveraged growth unwind by the major multi-strategy hedge funds. These pod shops are filled with quants who frequently end up in crowded trades – this time, it was semiconductors and AI.

Rumors circulated that ~108 separate pods closed and unwound on Thursday in what is best described as “forced liquidations.” That might help explain the fastest $2.5 trillion wipeout on record. (Note we saw a somewhat less ugly selloff on the last trading day of October).

For those unfamiliar with the term “pod shops,” these are multi-manager, multi-strategy hedge funds that have hundreds of small, semi-autonomous trading teams – aka “pods” – on the same platform. Many of the best-known multi-strat funds run large amounts of capital: Millennium ($98B), Citadel ($77B), Point72 ($55.5B), Balyasny ($37B), Schonfeld Strategic Advisors ($23.5B), Hudson Bay Capital ($20B), etc. Add to that Viking and many other Tiger shops, and it all adds up to a rather sizeable amount of capital.

The strategies may differ, but one consistent theme is centralized risk management that aggregates all positions across every pod’s book in real time. Last Thursday felt (at least to me) like many of these pods got caught in a crowded, systematic,long-leveraged growth equity trade. Think mega-cap growth, momentum, and tech names, especially AI/Semis.

The multi-strat shops are disciplined, mechanical, and formulaic. Any pod that hits a specific drawdown limit triggers a hard stop automatically. When I refer to forced liquidation, this is precisely what I mean.4

Can you tell in advance when a sell-off might occur? As the market trends upward, the leverage doesn’t get much notice. I would surmise it is close to impossible to guess when quakes of this sort might occur or when you can sound the all-clear whistle. We never really know just how crowded a trade might be until the unwind. (See JPM report at right as a counter-example of the dangers of assuming it was safe).

My bet is that Citadel Securities and Jane Street were the counterparties to a massive unwind, similar to the Situational Awareness trade over the summer. We will find out if that suspicion is true as soon as rumors of windfall trading profits in November for those two firms begin to circulate.

~~~

Was the catalyst political? I highly doubt it; Wednesday’s rally was long after the Blue Tsunami was understood. The much more likely cause was forced liquidations of a crowded quant/momentum trade driven by tightly run risk management at pod shops.

Cliff Asness explained a decade after the 2007 Quant Quake, “Crashes are runs on the bank and it’s very hard, even for genius physicists, to predict social panic, let alone the magnitude of one versus another.”

Some lessons from those experiences apparently became systematic trading rules, too…

Previously:
7 Surprising Market Data Points (after today’s selloff) (October 30, 2026)

5 Steps to Take Right Now (October 12, 2026)

__________

1. NVDA was down 2.6% YTD before the news broke last night, sending it ~5% lower pre-market today. For some context, the prior three years saw gains of 39%, 171% and 239%.

By the end of the day, it was much worse: NVDA ended Monday, November 9th, down ~25% from its October 5, 2026 highs….

2. Here is Bloomberg on the sale:

“Dutch bank ING is looking to sell roughly $500 million of data center loans as fears that the Democratic sweep in US midterm elections could stall many such projects triggered a market rout.

The lender is taking offers for a dozen loans via a so-called bids-wanted-in-competition process, according to people familiar with the matter, who asked not to be identified because the information is private. The loans for sale in the rare auction include a $25 million slice backing a massive data center site in New Mexico, part of OpenAI, SoftBank Group Corp. and Oracle Corp.’s joint Stargate project. Oracle has sent the developer a notice citing force majeure.”

3. Another estimate:

“Nomura estimated that these funds would need to sell approximately $47 billion into Thursday’s close—potentially the second-largest amount in its records dating to July 2006. That creates a feedback loop: falling prices trigger rebalancing sales, adding further pressure. This was an intraday estimate of required selling, not a verified final flow figure.”

4. The WSJ reported:

“Hedge Funds Dump Positions and Cut Staff as Selloff Deepens” Last month had highest rate of stock-picking funds unwinding positions in over a decade; Samlyn, Engineers Gate and Walleye cut staff

Note this was referring to October, and not last Thursday’s sell-off.

The post Quant Quake II? Thoughts on the Selloff appeared first on The Big Picture.

​• The 2026 Midterm Elections: What We Learned & What Comes Next: Mehlman Consulting’s post-mortem deck calls it a “hundred-year flood,” not a blue wave: most Democratic governors in 33 years, biggest House majority in 35, most state trifectas in 42 and the largest popular-vote margin in 50. For the first time in at least 150 years, a party holds zero House crossover districts. (Mehlman Consulting)

​• Donald Trump Is Bad at Politics: The Atlantic runs the scorecard on the supposed master of winning: lost the 2016 popular vote by two points, lost the House in 2018, lost in 2020, and won in 2024 almost by default against a fill-in candidate. Now a repudiation of historic size. The aura of mastery and domination that surrounds the president should now be permanently dispelled. (The Atlantic) see also The MAGA Faithful Confront the Unthinkable: Is This the End of MAGA?: Republican incumbents across the country lost to the Democratic wave, and the WSJ goes to West Palm Beach to see what the movement’s loyalists make of it. Some analysts now think MAGA won’t carry on as a major force in future elections. Brutal midterm wipeout forces hardcore loyalists to confront life after Trump Start planning and praying’ (Wall Street Journal)

​• Trick or Treat? Index Funds Beat Their Benchmarks More Often Than Active Funds Over the Past Decade: Jeffrey Ptak uses Morningstar’s finer active/passive categories to show index funds winning more often over ten years. The asset-weighted average index fund costs 0.05% versus 0.59% for the average discretionary active fund, about one-twelfth the price. (Morningstar)

• Claude can now analyze your spending with its new Personal Finance tool: Anthropic announced Thursday that Claude is getting a new tool called “Personal Finance,” designed to help users keep track of their money. With it, users can connect their bank and credit card accounts through Plaid and ask Claude questions about their finances. Anthropic says access is read-only, meaning Personal Finance can’t move, manage, or invest users’ money. (TechCrunch notes it is playing catch-up to ChatGPT, which introduced similar tools in May). (TechCrunch)

​• Your House vs. the Stock Market: Which Has Been a Better Investment?: WSJ research: over 40 years, the S&P 500’s annualized return beat housing in every state and local market on an after-tax basis. Seattle was the best housing market at 6.22% a year, then San Diego at 6.05%. The S&P was the more volatile ride, 16.5% a year against 9% for the average housing return. (Wall Street Journal)

• AI Is Coming for the Economists in the White House: The AI debate, which economists have been having for years in various contexts, has come for the profession itself. Jason Furman, chair of the Council of Economic Advisers under President Barack Obama and now a professor at Harvard, recently said that if he were running the CEA today, he would “somewhat regretfully and sadly” use current AI systems instead of hiring 20 actual human economists. The chair’s job, he added, is safe. (Bloomberg free)

• The Shingles Vaccine Isn’t Just for “Old” People: I’m in my 30s, but it felt worth it for a few reasons—including some exciting new research. (Slate) see also The surprising way walking can benefit your brain: Moving your body may help free your mind, research shows. (Washington Post)

• JD Vance Is the Trump Administration’s Biggest Weasel: After the largest midterm defeat since Watergate, the vice president posted a lengthy X essay blaming the administration he serves in, and the president in particular, for the Iran war. The vice president and 2028 hopeful is desperately trying to evade responsibility for the GOP’s bloodbath this week—by laying all the blame on his boss. He wants the job in two years without the stink of 2026 on him. (New Republic)

​• ‘At My Age, I Can Rant!’ Bernie Taupin on Elton John, Hellraising Vampires and Competing in Full-Blown Rodeos: Alexis Petridis interviews the lyricist. Asked about golf: “Can you imagine Keith Moon playing golf?”He is the outstanding lyricist who propelled the Rocket Man to 300m sales. As Taupin releases a wistfully grouchy solo album, he talks about the joy of anonymity, his LA drinking gang – and owning a prize-winning bucking bull (The Guardian)

• Dave Thomas Looks Back on ‘SCTV’ A new documentary explores the legacy of this sketch series, which is now available to stream. In an interview, a core cast member recalls its inception and his favorite sketches.​ Donald Liebenson talks to Thomas as Netflix streams the documentary “SCTV: The Greatest Show You’ve Never Heard Of,” a celebration of the sketch series that began in Canada in September 1976 and ran six seasons. (New York Times)

Video of the day:Why Did Evolution Keep ADHD? (Basically Primitive)

Be sure to check out our Masters in Business with Ann Berry, founder and Managing Partner of Threadneedle, an operating and capital advisory platform providing strategic guidance, operating support, and capital to high-growth private companies and investment platforms. She is also General Partner of the Threadneedle Opportunity Fund, investing in data analytics, AI, and web3 companies at the seed stage alongside Alexis Ohanian’s venture firm, 776. Berry also hosts After Earnings, Morning Brew’s interview podcast with public-company CEOs/CFOs.

BofA: The era of hyperscaler buybacks is over.

Source: @MikeZaccardi

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Image generated by ChatGPT

All you need to know is his wife Katie didn’t vote, because she was afraid if she registered her address would be made public and…

As it is, she and Stephen are already living on a military base, to ensure their safety. And if that doesn’t tell you all you need to know…

Isn’t this how it always plays out? The rich/elite separate themselves from the hoi polloi to ensure their theoretical invulnerability. From Versailles to Beverly Park… They fly private, they vacation at resorts you’ve never heard of and…

They’re doing it all on your money. It’s the everyday consumer who keeps the wheels of commerce humming.

So how much power does the public have?

Right now people are fired up. I’ve been living a long time and I’ve never seen anything like this. And all those ancient debates about the red and blue not being able to have a conversation, sit at the same table…those days are through.

Of course there are dyed-in-the-wool bonkers believers on the fringes of both parties. But what we learned on Tuesday is we’re more alike than different. It’s finally safe to invite everybody for Thanksgiving. Because one thing we can all agree on is…

We’re PISSED!

You’re supposed to keep the public quiet, their attention diverted, the last thing you want is focus. But Trump demanded it with his antics. Whether it be shooting people in the street or building his ballroom and even more just getting rich. 90% of voters listed corruption as one of their main complaints, why they voted blue. We haven’t all been on the same page since…

I don’t know when.

And now Trump is sticking it in our eye, by appointing the architect of the policies hated by the public. An outsider from his days in high school. We don’t need the class president, or the captain of the football team, but we do need someone who knows how to get along.

As for Trump himself… He seems to be taking a page from Putin’s playbook. Act like dissent doesn’t matter, and go behind the scenes to enforce your vision.

Now historically in America, at least in modern times, you could get away with your bad behavior, by saying everybody else was doing it. Even worse is drinking from the trough because the rich/elite give you access. What America did on Tuesday, and needs to do more, is say NO!

That’s the essence of morality, the essence of character.

And that’s the only thing that will save us.

Netanyahu would not be saying the election was stolen if Trump didn’t lay the groundwork in 2020. Ditto Bolsonaro.

I’m not saying I’m approving of a mob mentality, but this is something different, the people are mad as hell and they’re not going to take it anymore. Funny how they made that movie back in the seventies and now it’s the public on the bleeding edge as opposed to the film business, which notoriously plays it safe.

But people are hungry for edgy. This is how music lost its power. It became about the brand, grosses and… The most revered acts of all time were not necessarily the ones who hoovered up the most money.

So you’ve got to say no to those checks being offered. For your own benefit. You can’t be above the public, but right down in the pit with people.

This is what the Millers are trying to escape.

But that ship sailed over a decade ago. In today’s world everybody has a voice and everybody is equal. You’re grist for the mill. If you’re too big for your britches, if you’re a lyin’, stinkin’, scumbag, the minions are going to go wild on you online.

Everything we were told was true has been flipped. That the oligarchs dictated and…

Funny how all those companies left California for Texas, what now? Did you see the mayor of Houston just decoupled from ICE? If the police stop undocumented people, they’re not going to alert ICE.

Give the guy credit for adjusting. Unlike Agent Orange.

This is why you play the game, because you never know how it will turn out. No one expected a victory this big, no one expected the country to be this pissed.

So now…

We all want to return to business as usual, stop focusing on Washington, D.C., but before that happens…

We’ve got work to do.

Or as the Stones would say…WE’VE GOT THE TURD ON THE RUN

~~~

Visit the archive:   http://lefsetz.com/wordpress/

@Lefsetz  http://www.twitter.com/lefsetz
–
If you would like to subscribe to the LefsetzLetter

~~~

Originally published by Bob Lefsetz at the Leftsetz Letter

The post Stephen Miller’s Appointment appeared first on The Big Picture.

​• Anti-Oligarchy Activists Plan to Dox Elon Musk and Hundreds of Billionaire-Linked Homes: The Capytistas, a secretive group claiming more than $1.2 million in backing, started with Elon Musk and Tesla’s board. Members argue that those who buy political power deserve the scrutiny they’ll impose. (Wired)

​• A Chief of Staff Who ‘Will Crack Skulls’: Trump named Stephen Miller to replace Susie Wiles, completing a decade-long climb from congressional staffer to the most powerful aide in Washington. Wiles was the guardrail; Miller is the accelerant. The two seem to split on forcing journalists to reveal government sources, with arrests among the tactics discussed. Wiles pushed back. (The Atlantic) see also Will Trump Be Another Andrew Johnson?: Bruce Bartlett reprints the Reconstruction chapter of his 2008 book Wrong on Race: how the Radical Republicans of the 39th Congress fought a lame-duck president who broke the law to block them. The analogy to a scorched-earth Trump facing a Democratic Congress is left for the reader. (Bartlett’s Notations)

• Ads in Popular Apps Give Police a Powerful Tool to Spy on Users: Penlink’s Webloc is sold to police in the US, UK and worldwide. It uses technology found in weather, gaming, email and religious apps to locate people using their cellphones. (Bloomberg free)

• America’s Backlash Against Oligarchy: Why the megabillionaires lost big Tuesday: The midterm result was a tale of many backlashes. There was the backlash of erstwhile Trump voters, particularly young white males, against high gasoline prices and the Iran War. There was the backlash of Hispanic voters against ICE and Trump’s horrific deportation policy. There was the backlash of Black voters against Republicans’ gerrymandering to negate their votes and Trump’s open racism. There was the backlash of women against the destruction of abortion rights and suppression of the Epstein files. There was a backlash of ordinary families against the loss of healthcare coverage. There was a general backlash against Trump’s bottomless corruption and lies. And there was a backlash of patriotic Americans against Trump’s bromance with Putin. (Paul Krugman)

• Texas Pays Online School Empire For Kids Who Don’t Show Up: Stride, the nation’s largest operator of virtual public schools, has collected more than a billion dollars in taxpayer money in Texas alone. (Businessweek)

• He Helped Deport 200 People. Now He Has Misgivings. A deputy in small-town Texas became the local face of ICE’s national crackdown. (New York Times)

• ‘Abusing and Threatening and Harassing’: Inside the Collapse of Leo Terrell’s DOJ Antisemitism Task Force: Once the public face of the Trump administration’s campaign to reform elite universities, Leo Terrell now presides over an operation that former interns and Justice Department attorneys described as isolated, dysfunctional, and beset by internal conflict. (The Harvard Crimson

​• Through the Nazi Lens: Katja Hoyer on growing up with Guido Knopp’s history documentaries, which dominated German television before streaming, and what seeing the Third Reich through its own propaganda footage does to the viewer. (Katja Hoyer)

​• A Soldier Cut Off His Own Foot to Survive. Then Came a Daring Drone Rescue.: Pvt. Kostyantyn Vlasenko, 49, survived for months in a ruined school boiler room near Kupyansk, radioing Russian troop movements to his unit, missing part of one leg and, after the amputation, a foot on the other. Ukraine says its drone extraction was the first aerial evacuation of its kind. (Wall Street Journal)

• Sacha Baron Cohen’s ‘Ali G: Who Iz I?’ Lands on Prime Video: Drew Taylor: the new Ali G film hits streaming less than a week after its debut. The long-awaited sequel, which marks the comedian’s directorial debut, was only in theaters for a single weekend (The Wrap)

Video of the day: Why Didn’t Evolution Get Rid of Psychopaths? (Basically Primitive)

Be sure to check out our Masters in Business this weekend with Ann Berry, founder and Managing Partner of Threadneedle, an operating and capital advisory platform providing strategic guidance, operating support, and capital to high-growth private companies and investment platforms. She is also General Partner of the Threadneedle Opportunity Fund, investing in data analytics, AI, and web3 companies at the seed stage alongside Alexis Ohanian’s venture firm, 776. Berry also hosts After Earnings, Morning Brew’s interview podcast with public-company CEOs/CFOs.

Voters rejected 44 of 45 data center measures on ballots nationwide.

Source: Paul Kedrosky

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~~~

To learn how these reads are assembled each day, please see this.

The post 10 Sunday Reads appeared first on The Big Picture.

This week, I speak with Ann Berry, founder and Managing Partner of Threadneedle, an operating and capital advisory platform providing strategic guidance, operating support, and capital to high-growth private companies and investment platforms. She is also General Partner of the Threadneedle Opportunity Fund, investing in data analytics, AI, and web3 companies at the seed stage alongside Alexis Ohanian’s venture firm, 776.

Born and raised in London, and the first in her family to attend college, Ann earned a double-first in economics at Cambridge and an MBA from Harvard Business School, where she was a Baker Scholar. She joined Goldman Sachs’ M&A team in London in 2003 and spent 11 years at the firm, moving to the principal investing side to acquire companies across the consumer, industrial, and financial sectors.

We discuss her path from Goldman Sachs M&A and private equity to the operating side, and what it was like to parachute into a hospitality services company as CEO just as the pandemic shut the industry down. We talk about why she now focuses on bringing technology to legacy industries that stand to gain most from it, her early-stage bets on AI and on deepfake detection, and how she thinks about the expanding IPO landscape and the blurring line between public and private markets.

A list of her favorite books is here; A transcript of our conversation will be available shortly.

You can stream and download our full conversation, including any podcast extras, on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, and Bloomberg. All of our earlier podcasts on your favorite pod hosts can be found here.

Be sure to check out our Masters in Business next week with Salim Ramji, CEO of Vanguard Group, the world’s largest asset manager.

Current Reading

Churchill: Walking with Destiny by Andrew Roberts

The Algorithm: The Hypergrowth Formula That Transformed Tesla, Lululemon, General Motors, and SpaceX by Jon McNeill

The Infinity Machine: Demis Hassabis, DeepMind, and the Quest for Superintelligence by Sebastian Mallaby

Project Maven: A Marine Colonel, His Team, and the Dawn of AI Warfare by Katrina Manson

The post MiB: Ann Berry, Threadneedle Founder & CIO on Providing Capital to Tech Cos appeared first on The Big Picture.

• The Texas Miracle Texas Democrats broke the map. Texas Republicans broke themselves. Make no mistake: Blue Texas is a seismic event in American politics. I know this because I can count, and because Republicans have always said it would be, when they were not too busy gloating that it would never happen. ​Talarico’s Senate win handed Democrats the chamber and ended three decades of unbroken Republican rule; Gina Hinojosa took the governorship from Abbott. Cruz said “if Texas falls, everything changes.” It fell. (Mother Jones)

• How to Spot a Market Bubble: How valuation, easy credit, speculation, and impossible growth expectations create financial manias. An expensive market by itself is not a bubble. Prices can be uncomfortably high for years without crashing, as long as buyers pay cash, banks stay rational, and expectations stay grounded. Polymath Investor opens with Scott McNealy’s 2002 confession that Sun at $64, ten times sales, required 100% of revenue for ten years with zero costs just to pay investors back; it went below $5. An expensive market alone is not a bubble. Their “Four-Cylinder Ignition Rule”: extreme prices, reckless borrowing, frenzied crowd gambling and impossible growth math, all at once. (Polymath Investor)

• AI Has Taken Over Every Corner of the Market: This week’s stock selloff shows how the industry has become deeply embedded in pensions, debt markets and the broader economy, touching everyone’s wealth. (Bloomberg free)

• The unlikely queen of the bagel business: She’s taught dozens of entrepreneurs around the world how to make bagels — and money. Katherine Laidlaw on Beth George, 63, the “bagel whisperer” who has trained dozens of operators around the world in making bagels and money. Opens in a Toronto back kitchen where a $1.5k oven repair on a $40k machine is the difference between one shop open and two. (The Hustle)

• Exactly how Apple Music used sound to build its new brand identity: For its rebrand of Apple Music, TBWA\Media Arts Lab set out to visualise sound. The result involved months of experimentation, a surprising amount of oil, and a renewed appreciation for showing your workings. (It’s Nice That)

​• Silicon Valley’s ‘In-Flight Magazine’: Colossus Gives Moguls the Coverage They Crave: Tech’s corner offices have no love left for the news media, so a lushly produced oversize print quarterly is giving them the coverage they want instead. A venture capitalist’s glossy quarterly wants to be The New Yorker for tech billionaires. (San Francisco Standard)

• Why hasn’t there been a major financial crisis in recent years? Since the 2008 crisis, and the subsequent sovereign crisis in the Eurozone, we have yet to see another financial crisis happen on a scale that had a lasting market and macroeconomic impact. Why? We examine why the post-GFC era has seen fewer financial crises. Explanations include the reforms made after 2008 to avoid a repeat, the lower proportion of financial assets held by the banking system, as well as the speedier reaction of policymakers when wobbles have occurred. Henry Allen, Peter Sidorov and Camilla Siazon, Deutsche Bank Research: a 19-page look at why the post-GFC era has produced fewer crises, and which vulnerabilities might produce the next one. (Deutsche Bank Research)

• The Afterlife of Pi: Russell Samora’s scrolling history of pi’s digits and the random walk, from a pi obsessive in 1853 through Pearson’s 1905 “problem of the random walk” in Nature, to a billion digits generated in 4.2 seconds today. (Pudding)¸

• Deskilling the body: We are, moment by moment, doing less sensing, navigating, remembering, walking, choosing, and attending. (Aeon)

• The Brain Injury That Made a Middle School Teacher a Musical Genius: When Ed Freytag suffered a brain injury in a motorcycle accident, it unlocked a rare musical talent. (New York Times)

Video of the day: Michael Mauboussin Master Class — Moats, Skill, Luck, Decision Making and a Whole Lot More (Acquired)

Be sure to check out our Masters in Business this weekend with Ann Berry, founder and Managing Partner of Threadneedle, an operating and capital advisory platform providing strategic guidance, operating support, and capital to high-growth private companies and investment platforms. She is also General Partner of the Threadneedle Opportunity Fund, investing in data analytics, AI, and web3 companies at the seed stage alongside Alexis Ohanian’s venture firm, 776. Berry also hosts After Earnings, Morning Brew’s interview podcast with public-company CEOs/CFOs.

Global crude oil flows through the 2026 Hormuz closure

Source: Oil Flows 2026

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To learn how these reads are assembled each day, please see this.

The post 10 Weekend Reads appeared first on The Big Picture.

That headline is LOL

Although this one is even more LOL (as I don’t really address this)
Ritholtz on What’s Causing the Stock Selloff.

I have no idea why this clip went viral yesterday, but it’s racked up 184,000 YouTube views, and over 270k combined across all YT channels.

My pushback to the uncertainty meme is my favorite part of this. If you really want to have a giggle, check out the comments, a full blown exercise in the Dunning Kruger effect..

I really need to get a better backdrop set for my home office…

The post “Stocks Plunge as Traders Dump Everything With AI Exposure” appeared first on The Big Picture.

• The Real Culprit Behind High Grocery Prices: Rogé Karma: from 2015 to 2019 wages grew about 30 times faster than grocery prices; food now costs about 30% more than in January 2020. City-run stores and price controls would barely dent it. The Kitchen Table Project’s answer is a public option for food purchasing, using the government buying power already deployed for the military and schools. Although neither farmers nor grocers make very much money, many of the middlemen who operate between them make plenty of it.​ (The Atlantic)

• The Election Day Revolt That Threatens America’s AI Boom: Americans’ vote for antidata-center candidates and ballot measures could rein in AI’s expansion and hobble economic growth. Voters backed candidates and ballot measures to ban or slow data center development. Texas, Georgia and Ohio, over 40% of planned US capacity, elected Democrats pledging to pause rollouts; Brad Gerstner figures 25% to 35% of next year’s build-out is now at risk. Jensen Huang’s election-night crowd was at the San Francisco Opera watching Figaro. (Wall Street Journal) see also ​Michael Kratsios: The Office of the Frontier: Colossus on the science adviser who figured the way to make the President care about science was to hand national medals to the billionaires he respects, and one to Trump himself. (Colossus) 

​• How Demographics Can Distort Economic Narratives — Redux: Valentina Romei: the US posted 3.4% annualized Q3 growth versus 0.2% in Germany, flat Italy and a 0.1% contraction in France. Strip out population growth and the gap between the 17 rich economies looks very different. (Financial Times)

• Democrats poised to break GOP’s 16-year grip on statehouses: Democrats are on track to take control of a majority of legislative chambers, ending 16 years of Republican dominance over America’s statehouses. If current leads hold, 75% of Americans will live in a state with a Democratic governor, and 53% will live in Democratic trifectas. (Axios)

• The Physics of Getting Fired: Physics offered me a sense of order and purpose. But when life got messy I realised it had a much deeper insight to give (Aeon)

• The Trump Decade Is Over: Derek Thompson, ten years to the week after 2016: Talarico by 12 in Texas, Ossoff by 18 in Georgia, a Democratic Senate win in Kansas for the first time since the Depression, and markets now pricing Mississippi above 90% for Democrat Scott Colom. The VP is already publicly distancing himself. (Derek Thompson) see also Trump Now Has to Govern Through a Midterm Meltdown of His Own Making: The architect of the Republican midterm collapse stepped out from the rubble on Tuesday night and insisted it wasn’t his fault. (Bloomberg) see also ‘I Have Seen the Enemy, and It Is Us’: Inside Team Trump’s Historic Collapse: How an unpopular president and an unpopular war provided an opening for Democrats to make sweeping gains in the midterms. (New York Times)

• The Self-Making World: Lamarck was 65 when Philosophie zoologique came out in 1809, proposing that every living thing is constantly transforming itself. Long mocked and misunderstood, Lamarck’s radical idea that organisms shape themselves and their world is making a comeback. ​Aeon on why his idea of uncontrollable creative power keeps unsettling autocrats from Napoleon onward. (Aeon)

​• What Democrats Can Do: Paul Krugman: Trump keeps the veto and the Democratic majorities can’t override it. What they do get is committee gavels and subpoena power, which matters more against this administration than a normal one. The point of hearings is to bring the corruption into sunlight. (Paul Krugman) see also Don’t Read The Mandate Down: No one wins a historic realignment election because inflation is slightly above trend. The public wants an end to the scourges of tyranny. Deliver it. (Off Message)

​• Is Curiosity Good for Us?: Adam Phillips on the superego, which slipped into ordinary language as the secular conscience but has had a far more chequered career as an idea than that suggests. (London Review of Books)

• The Story Behind Edward Hopper’s Iconic Painting, “Nighthawks” Louis Shadwick on Hopper’s Most Famous Work.  (Literary Hub)

Video of the day: Trump Remade the GOP. How Do the Ultrarich Feel? | WSJ (The Wall Street Journal)

Be sure to check out our Masters in Business this weekend with Ann Berry, founder and Managing Partner of Threadneedle, an operating and capital advisory platform providing strategic guidance, operating support, and capital to high-growth private companies and investment platforms. She is also General Partner of the Threadneedle Opportunity Fund, investing in data analytics, AI, and web3 companies at the seed stage alongside Alexis Ohanian’s venture firm, 776. Berry also hosts After Earnings, Morning Brew’s interview podcast with public-company CEOs/CFOs.

After an extraordinary wave, what comes next?

Source: Silver Bulletin

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The post 10 Friday AM Reads appeared first on The Big Picture.

At The Money: How Do Financial Professionals Invest Their Own Money? (November 4, 2026)

Most investment authors tell you what to do with your money – but they never tell you what they do with their money. Brian Portnoy holds a PhD from the University of Chicago. His latest book is “How I Invest My Money,” foreworded by my partner, Josh Brown (CEO of Ritholtz Wealth).

Full transcript below.

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About this week’s guest:

Brian Portnoy is founder and CEO of Shaping Wealth, which helps advisors and their clients to achieve “funded contentment,” and operates as an outsourced Chief Behavioral Officer. Portnoy has held senior investment roles throughout the hedge fund and mutual fund industries.

For more info, see:

Shaping Wealth Bio

LinkedIn

Twitter

At the Money: How Much Money Is Too Much?

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Find all of the previous At the Money episodes here, and in the MiB feed on Apple Podcasts, YouTube, Spotify, and Bloomberg. And find the entire musical playlist of all the songs I have used on At the Money on Spotify

TRANSCRIPT:

Bloomberg · Barry Ritholtz with Brian Portnoy, CEO of Shaping Wealth · Transcript

BARRY RITHOLTZ: Most investment authors tell you what to do with your money, but they never reveal what they do with their own money. That bothered Brian Portnoy. He spent more than 20 years in the mutual fund and hedge fund industries. He holds a PhD from the University of Chicago, and he is the CEO of Shaping Wealth. His 2018 book, The Geometry of Wealth, was really a fascinating exploration of behavioral finance and emotional intelligence. He has co-edited two editions of How I Invest My Money with my partner Josh Brown—full disclosure, Josh is at Ritholtz Wealth Management. So let’s talk a little bit about both of these books. They’re really very different from the usual investment tomes. Tell me a little bit about their genesis.

BRIAN PORTNOY: Thanks, Barry. Appreciate it. The genesis is a fun little story. It was 2019, and Josh, who you know and I know is a very sharp and good writer, published a blog with the title “How I Invest My Money,” and he made the simple observation that in all the years that he’s been in the market, no one’s really ever asked him for investment advice or financial planning advice. So he decided to write a blog that walked through how he builds his portfolio, venture investments in friends’ companies, a variety of things. And it got great feedback. It was very well done. I read it, I texted him, I said, “This was great, and hey, what do you think about getting a bunch of our friends together to write similar short blogs or chapters, and we could put it together as a volume?” And he loved the idea. I called our friend Craig Pierce at Harriman House and said, “Craig, what do you think?” I’ll say, from me texting Josh to us having a book contract was about 72 hours. Harriman House was very into it. Josh and I proceeded to build a volume of 25 contributors, and that volume was published in 2020 and really received wonderful reviews. And as you indicated, we’ve followed up with a second volume very recently.

BARRY RITHOLTZ: So the really interesting thing about this is, with some people who are free to share their advice, the question comes up: Hey, might they be a little reluctant to open the kimono about how they run their own books, their own portfolios, their own household finances? Did you get any pushback from people who were a little reluctant to drop their professional personas and speak honestly about what they do with their own money?

BRIAN PORTNOY: The short answer is no. For the first volume, 25 phone calls, 25 chapters.

BARRY RITHOLTZ: Really?

BRIAN PORTNOY: Yeah, 25 for 25.

BARRY RITHOLTZ: That’s amazing. Second one, no hesitation? Nobody tapped out? Nobody said, “Not for me”?

BRIAN PORTNOY: Second volume, 25 for 25. But your word—hesitation. So here’s the thing, and a word that has surfaced with the publishing of these two volumes that I think is so important to being successful financially, which is permission. Effectively, we gave permission to people. They happen to be financial experts, financial advisors, portfolio managers, economists, and the like. But we gave permission to, quote unquote, go there—talk about how you invest your money. Because think about an equity fund manager. Well, they might run a large-cap equity sleeve and be very good at that, but when they think about running their money, well, they’re going to have lots of equities, lots of bonds, they’re going to have real estate, they’re going to be doing a lot of different things with their money beyond the portfolio. Charitable giving and insuring and risk management, on and on. And so the stories ended up being this unbelievable kaleidoscope of different journeys. And Barry, it’s the part that I’m proudest of in this ongoing project. Now 50 chapters, 50 completely distinct life stories from people who all know, quote unquote, the right answer. But then when invited to—and again, given their permission—to really talk about how they invest, how they allocate to the things that are important to them, they went in their own direction and expressed it in a very unique way.

BARRY RITHOLTZ: So I’m really curious about both the first 25 people in the first book and the second 25 people—or I should say the other 24 people, because I’m one of them in the second book.

BRIAN PORTNOY: Yep.

BARRY RITHOLTZ: How did you put that list together? Did you just go through the contacts on your phone, or was there a “Hey, let’s have a few of these and a few of those”? What did that look like?

BRIAN PORTNOY: It was important for me to have a diverse set of voices. One of the outcomes that I want from this ongoing project is for readers—just regular folks, friends and neighbors—to pick up the volume. You’ve now got 50 four-page chapters, very easy bite-size insights. I want people to find voices that resonate with them. And so it was important for me that we have people further along in their career, we have people who are relatively young, we have men, we have women, we have people of color. We’ve just got sort of a differentiated set of perspectives that tie into individual journeys, and those are what they are. The feedback that we’ve gotten from so many readers is exactly that: One, I was able to find some voices that really synced with my life experience, and then secondly, I read chapters from other contributors and I would’ve never thought about that particular perspective or journey. So I think it was important in both volumes to have a mix of people so that everyone can appreciate the diversity of experiences that we have with our money stories.

BARRY RITHOLTZ: Did contributors get a brief—“Hey, we want you to talk about this or that”—or was it just a blank page without any structure and, “Hey, we want a thousand words. Knock yourself out”?

BRIAN PORTNOY: Completely blank page. There was a one-line instruction: Answer the question, how do you invest your money? You contributed, you saw that firsthand. In the second volume, people could look back and see what folks did in the first volume. But with the first volume, this being just a total greenfield experiment, what was really neat was to see that we gave that simple instruction and people tended not to answer the question “how I invest my money.” They leaned into why I invest my money, because we got all these wonderful stories about families and priorities and hopes and dreams and fears. So it really isn’t sort of a bullet-point list of, “Hey, I have a 75% allocation to equity and a 20% allocation to bonds and 5% allocation to real estate.” That’s not the way these turned out. Some people went into more detail on their specific investments, but without asking, what the contributors did across all 50 chapters was basically say: This is my life. This is what’s important to me, and this is how I allocate my capital. I mean, you in particular, Barry, were one of a handful of people in the two volumes who pointed out that when we’re talking about money, we’re actually talking about our capital—our financial capital, our temporal capital, our social capital, our human capital. And we’re all making decisions about what those are and how we want to invest them in order to live the life that we want.

BARRY RITHOLTZ: I’m curious about the use of proceeds. I should have asked you this earlier, but let’s talk about the royalties on this book. This isn’t just a money grab for the authors. Tell us a little bit about that.

BRIAN PORTNOY: Anyone who publishes a book outside of someone like our friend Morgan Housel knows there’s not a lot of money in this. There really isn’t. So no, this was a labor of love. Everybody contributed their chapters without any expectation of compensation. And as I said to several of the contributors to the two volumes, if you want one twenty-fifth of the proceeds, I’m happy to send that to you. Or I could just send you a Starbucks gift card so that you can get maybe a large coffee.

BARRY RITHOLTZ: So I’m curious as to the biggest surprises in each edition. What chapters kind of leapt out at you and said, “Hey, I’ve never really thought about this aspect of money and investing quite this way before”?

BRIAN PORTNOY: It’s a good question, and I think back—volume one was published six years ago, so I’ll have to rack my brain a little bit. It was really the stories that people surfaced, and how well they were able to articulate things in their lives that brought them joy, that were important to them. So in the first volume, a couple or three people. I mean, Bob Seawright wrote a beautiful chapter about a cottage, a vacation home that his family has had for a couple of generations. And his chapter on how I invest my money was really about how do they maintain that house as a place where grandparents, parents, and grandkids can come together and enjoy life. At the same time, Dasarte Yarnway in volume one wrote a beautiful chapter—it was sort of an immigrant’s tale about how his family came from Africa, built a life in America, and how that influenced the way Dasarte thinks about his portfolio and supporting his family and community. Leighann Miko, writing about growing up in pretty intense scarcity and how that impacted her perspective on becoming a financial advisor who could help people really come along. So volume one—you asked about surprising. I wouldn’t say that I was terribly surprised. I thought I knew most of these people reasonably well. It was a delight to read their life story and learn something new about them. And the same experience carried over to volume two. Heather Robertson Fortner wrote a very personal tale about some intense childhood struggles she had that established and changed her lens on money. Samantha Russell, who many in the industry know well—tragically, at a very young age, she lost her husband to cancer and has three small children, and asked some very profound questions about what does any of this matter? Basically, like, how do I invest my money? Like, who gives a flip? I’ve had this tragedy and it has made it so clear what’s truly important. And so the money questions, which are real—because you need the portfolio, you need the insurance, you need to have the estate plan, and thankfully they had that in place before her husband passed—all of that is in this broader context of navigating life’s ups and downs, uncertainties, happiness, tragedy, and so forth. The surprise with someone’s financial strategy, not so much. The surprise is usually delightful in terms of, wow, I didn’t know that about this person—on almost every page.

BARRY RITHOLTZ: Huh, really interesting. So the underlying thesis is, hey, people always tell you what to do, but they don’t tell you what they do. I’m curious: Where were the biggest gaps between the typical investment recommendations and the sort of things people either actually do or think about and talk about as part of their approach to investing?

BRIAN PORTNOY: I think across all 50 chapters, you see a pretty subjective approach to risk. We know technically that risk can be measured and managed in some quantitative ways that tell us whether or not we’re taking too much, too little, or the right amount of risk. I think what we saw across many of the chapters were narratives about how attitudes toward risk, which tended to come from childhood and adolescent experiences, then later influenced an approach to managing the family finances. A couple of specific examples. Mortgages, I think—and we could talk about whether there’s a sample bias in who came along for this journey. But on the mortgage front, there are a number of people who indicated that they paid off their mortgage early. You can run the math and you could say, well, if I don’t pay off my mortgage early and I take that extra cash flow and I invest it in the market, there’s probably going to be—depending on your rate—a delta between the rate of return in the market and your mortgage rate, and hopefully that’s a positive delta. And so it’s, quote unquote, rational to not pay off your mortgage—forget about it. A number of people, including me, have paid off their mortgage at one point or another because it just feels good to know that, leaving aside taxes, you own your home and you’re safe and you’re secure. The number one question with our money lives, with financial planning across the board, is simply: Am I going to be okay? You saw lots of these financial experts in their own way answer the question, am I going to be okay? Paying off the mortgage is one thing. Establishing that safety, holding a lot of cash—another theme that came up multiple times across both volumes. There’s a, quote unquote, optimal level of cash that you want to have in your portfolio relative to the risk you’re taking, relative to your monthly expenses, and whether you set aside six months of living expenses, whatever rule you choose. Lo and behold, we saw a number of people hold what the theory would say is too much cash. But in the same vein as paying off mortgages early, there’s a certain element of safety that comes through that, and you forsake maybe higher long-term returns for that feeling of safety now.

BARRY RITHOLTZ: We’ve all had this conversation with people, and I believe the question that we often ask is wrong. It’s not, which is mathematically the optimum solution. The question is, for you and your personality and your risk tolerance and your just sense of wellbeing, are you willing to do what is suboptimal mathematically for something that is going to be—I don’t want to say optimal, but much better psychologically, much better in terms of your comfort level? A lot of—I don’t want to say left-brain people, but a lot of the math people. And just as an aside, my CFO, Bill Sweet, and I have this ongoing discussion about, do you take the cash back on your credit card or do you take the points? And Bill, who is a CFO, says, “Well, of course you take the cash back.” And me, who has been married for nearly 35 years, says, “No, I want the points,” because $43.72 dropping into my checking account will kind of sneak by unnoticed. But when I want to buy that really stupid cappuccino maker for two grand and my wife is going to make me sleep in the backyard—“Honey, I’m getting it with points.” “Oh, go ahead then.” So sometimes the optimal mathematical solution may not be the optimal human solution.

BRIAN PORTNOY: So Daniel Crosby, who is a good friend and an expert in behavioral finance, wrote exactly about this and used the line that there’s a difference between spreadsheet optimal and behaviorally optimal. So in a sense, How I Invest My Money, both volumes one and two, are sort of masterclasses in applied behavioral finance, because we’re asking the experts to reflect on which version of optimal are you going to choose. And across the board, it was the behaviorally optimal path that they took. We know that the best financial plan is the plan that you can stick with. And so if you build the perfect plan according to modern portfolio theory, but it introduces behavioral risks that the client can’t manage, well, then you don’t have a good portfolio. So unfortunately for the ultra-left-brain folks among us, it’s life. It’s a mess. But this is what we do. This is the good stuff.

BARRY RITHOLTZ: Wes Gray of Alpha Architect wrote a white paper a couple of years ago where the highest-returning combination of factors was something like deep value and momentum, but it was so volatile and the drawdowns were so fierce that he titled the paper “Even God Would Get Fired as an Active Manager.” Just to give you an idea.

BRIAN PORTNOY: I love that piece.

BARRY RITHOLTZ: The difference between mathematically and behaviorally optimum. Second to last question: Any conflicting approaches? Are there, throughout the books, different chapters that sort of lie in opposition to each other? Or are they really more, listen, we kind of forget personal finance is personal, and what’s right for one person may not be right for another?

BRIAN PORTNOY: Tim Maurer has that great line that personal finance is more personal than finance. So based on risk tolerances or approach to risk, mapping it up to goals, short-term and long-term, you see a pretty wide range of people who have more aggressive portfolios versus more conservative portfolios. The key is to understand the why. So what is it about who you are now and what you want to achieve, but also your experiences that got you here, that led you to have a portfolio that’s more balanced between stocks and bonds versus one that’s entirely in equities, where you’re okay with taking what’s likely to be more volatility in the hopes that that portfolio returns more over time? So I’d say that there are disagreements across the chapters if you put them in the same room in terms of how to invest. But the point is that all of these folks, all 50 of them, are saying, well, this is the way I invest, and it’s not in conflict with how I might manage client assets. It’s just that what I do for them isn’t perfectly mapping to my life and my constraints—taking care of kids, supporting parents as they age, things you want to do in the community. Imagine the full range of choices that we have. Even if you’re a seasoned portfolio manager with an outstanding track record or a financial advisor who’s been taking care of families for the last 20 or 30 years, your life circumstances are yours. Everybody is quite unique. So that’s what makes these chapters so fun and colorful. You could just find different smart people doing it differently.

BARRY RITHOLTZ: And last question: Did editing the book change how you invest your own money, or what you wanted to accomplish with that money?

BRIAN PORTNOY: No. No, because I think good financial planning starts by looking in the mirror. And that’s something that I’ve done a lot. I think I’ve been reasonably thoughtful about who I am and my money journey. I write about this and do this for a living. I have what I think is a healthy, ongoing dialogue with my wife about this. Increasingly we’re folding our adult children into more mature conversations about finances and legacy and things like that. So I was delighted to see the range of perspectives, the way folks wrote about answering, well, how much is enough? What risks should I take? How do I navigate this complex relationship? I learned a lot, but in terms of the way that we’ve managed our own financial assets and my philosophy, which is really based around simplicity, diversification, and compounding—I would say that those have been some anchor principles for me for a very long time. And those did not change based on editing these chapters.

BARRY RITHOLTZ: So to wrap up: If you consume a lot of financial content—be it on television, print, or, heaven forbid, social media—and you’ve ever been curious about what those people telling you what to do with your money actually do with their own money, this is the book for you: How I Invest My Money, edited by Brian Portnoy and Josh Brown, volume one and now volume two, out today. I’m Barry Ritholtz. You are listening to Bloomberg’s At the Money.

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Find our entire music playlist for At the Money on Spotify.

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