About The Big Picture
Welcome to The Big Picture! Allow me to tell you what this site is all about:
The blog is a compendium of what a professional money manager (that’s me) is looking at, thinking about, and publishing on. I write most of it (with some help from the crew). It is designed for a wide audience ranging from investment professionals to media types to anyone else interested in investing, markets, and the economy, with a healthy sprinkling of behavioral analysis and digital media thrown in for good measure. (I approach most investing issues with one foot in the behavioral camp, the other thrown in with the quants).
It is, by design, laden with facts, statistics, and informed, data-driven opinions. I avoid the squishy, touchy-feely “I think/hope/want” type of fact-free analysis so prevalent in the media and on Wall Street. This area has been my wheelhouse for ~20 years. I have been blogging on it since 2003 (earlier if you include Yahoo GeoCities).
By sheer accident, TBP has become one of highest trafficked and best reviewed finance blogs on the web. I key in on what you should be thinking about when it comes to markets and the economy — and what you should not be doing with your time and money.
The writing is designed to be very accessible — no PhD required. Hell, no college degree needed. If I can make this stuff understandable to my right brain art teacher wife and my 75 year old retired real estate agent mom, then I can help you learn the basics of markets, investing and the economy.
Over the years, we have put up a fair bit of content:
26,000 posts
391,322 comments
109,381,710 visits
137,637,602 page views
. . . and counting.
The readership of The Big Picture ranges from Mom & Pop investors to Wall Street money managers; economists, strategists, professional investors, print & tv & radio journalists, and more are regular readers. Traffic logs show visitors come from the Federal Reserve, Goldman Sachs, the Joint Economic Committee of Congress, as well as Dr. Wu’s statistic class at Sonoma State University.
Since its humble Typepad days, The Big Picture has evolved as a site. A quick overview:
Main Blog Posts: Most of these are written by Ritholtz. This is the heart of the blog, and its identified by the yellow Big Picture tab.
Each morning, I post some general thoughts on the market, economy, investing, whatever. Around the time the US markets open, my morning read go up. Around lunchtime, my chart of the day gets published. I try to find some funky digital oddity for mid-afternoon. After the markets close, the PM reads make their appearance. At various other times, interesting videos and commentary from the Think Tank authors appear.
Tab Content: In the prior version of the blog, there were 4 tabs beyond the front page (Think Tank, Video, Book Club and Weekend). That “Web 2.0” tab layout has since been eliminated. Instead, these posts are labeled with self explanatory, individually colored rectangular tabs.
Perhaps a word about what the Think Tank might be in order. It was created to be a salon for interesting provocative intelligent “other voices.” The authors who publish here are people I know for 10 years and longer and respect a great deal. These are fantastic Economists, Analysts, Strategists, Technicians and Market watchers. (Their bios are here). They are a top notch group of pros. And while I may not agree with everything that’s in here, but you can be confident that it is thoughtful and well considered.
Side Column: The right hand column is a blog staple — but we’ve tweaked this to make it a little more interesting. At the top is our Quote of the Day. I have collected 1000s of these over the years, and a different one appears each day. Any similarity to published content and the QOTD is strictly coincidental, as the Word Press quote plug in selects one randomly each day.
Still have questions? Our Blog FAQ is here.
