Barry Ritholtz Time Quotations

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

The big issue is decelerating earnings growth. Earnings will still be higher but the ideal time to buy stocks is when earnings go from awful to not so bad as opposed to going from great to good.

It was a matter of time before the core rate started feeling the effects of increased energy and commodity prices. Maybe it's aberrational but maybe it's the start of something more significant.