About Barry Ritholtz

Barry L. Ritholtz is co-founder, chairman, and chief investment officer of Ritholtz Wealth Management LLC. Launched in 2013, RWM is a financial planning and asset management firm, with over $3 billion dollars in assets under management. RWM was named ETF Advisor of the Year, is on the Financial Times Top 300 Advisors in the US, and is the 4th fastest-growing RIA in America.

His career history is filled with cutting-edge innovation and new ideas: He was one of the earliest traders to embrace behavioral economics, he created one of the first and most popular market blogs; his podcast was groundbreaking and among the earliest in the investment spaces. Named one of the “15 Most Important Economic Journalists” in the United States, he has been called one of the 25 Most Dangerous People in Financial Media. He writes a weekly column for Bloomberg Opinion (2013- 2021) and wrote a twice-monthly column on Personal Finance and Investing for The Washington Post (2011-2016).

“For a guy with a small investment business, Barry Ritholtz of Bloomberg has a huge voice. He is unusually brief and cuts through market nonsense and bad investment management practices. He has a nose for BS. And America’s market jabber overflows in BS.”  –USA Today

Called the “blogfather” for his long-standing finance weblog, The Big Picture. the site generates half a million page views per month and has been covering everything investing-related since 2003. The blog has amassed ~275 million visitors over that 20 year period. Media accolades TED named TBP one of top 100 Websites You Should Know and Use; TBP was featured in the New York Times Magazine “Year in Ideas,”(DIY Economics); Numerous traffic sites rank The Big Picture as one of the most trafficked Markets/Economic’s blogs on the web.

“To say that Barry Ritholtz ‘pulls no punches’ is like saying that Joe Louis had a nice right cross.”-Jesse’s Café Américain

He is the creator and host of Masters in Business, the most popular podcast on Bloomberg Radio. These 60-90 minute conversations are with many of the most accomplished, fascinating people in business and finance. The ground-breaking podcast quickly set the standard for business interviews and helped “podcastify” Bloomberg. It gets streamed or downloaded 8-10 million times per year. MiB won the Adweek 2023 Audio Award for the Best Business-to-Business Podcast. You can learn more about MIB here.

He is the author of Bailout Nation (Wiley, 2009; updated paperback 2010). Bailout Nation became on of the best-reviewed books on the crisis, Named “Investment Book of the Year,” it also won a First Amendment Award for Outstanding Journalism. Bailout Nation was named one of the best finance/business books of 2009 by USA Today, Miami Herald, and Marketplace Radio.

Ritholtz first came to the wider public’s attention when he issued a series of warnings about an impending market collapse and recession. A 50%  downside target of Dow 6800 was widely ridiculed until it March 2009. Dow Jones Market Talk noted that “many market observers predict tops and bottoms, but few successfully get their timing right. Jeremy Grantham and Barry Ritholtz sit in the latter category…”  (A summary of major market calls can be found here). He was named Yahoo Tech Ticker’s Guest of the Year in 2009.

His observations are unique in that they are the result of both quantitative data AND behavioral economics, and a function of his unusual career path in finance.

Mr. Ritholtz graduated from Yeshiva University’s Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law in New York, where he was a member of the Law Review and graduated Cum Laude. At Stony Brook University, he graduated with a Bachelor of Arts & Sciences degree in Political Science (while also studying Mathematics and Physics). He was a member of the Stony Brook Equestrian Team, competing successfully in the 1981 national championships of the Intercollegiate Horse Show Association. He wrote the National Affairs column for the campus weekly (The Stony Brook Press), was elected Vice-President of the student body.

When not bemoaning the New York Knicks‘ all-too-frequent offensive lapses, Mr. Ritholtz is a vintage sports car enthusiast. He and his wife Wendy, an artist and teacher, live on the North Shore of Long Island, New York with their monsters Teddy and Cody.