Barry Ritholtz

The beauty of diversification is it's about as close as you can get to a free lunch in investing.

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.

The ability to select stocks, manage them over time and know when to sell them is incredibly difficult, even for professional fund managers.

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.

Little white lies are told by humans all the time. Indeed, lying is often how we get through each day in a happy little bubble. We spend time and energy rationalizing our own behaviors, beliefs and decision-making processes.

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.

I have been a member of the Microsoft-bashing society for quite some time.

Any time you speak to people about their posture, you learn about their most recent investment activity. When someone just bought stocks, they tend to be bullish; someone who just sold is bearish.

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.

A hedge fund manager whose clients demand monthly performance reports has different needs than any individual investors with a 20-year time horizon. The needs of that long-term investor differ markedly from someone who is retiring in three years.

Most of the time, economic data is fairly benign. I don't wish to imply it is meaningless, but it is not a driver of stock markets. Indeed, the correlation between economic noise and how equity markets perform has been wildly overemphasized.

If you have read me for any length of time, you know I am less than enthralled with much of what passes for financial news.