Ritholtz Wealth Management’s chief market strategist shares her framework for sussing out signal from market noise, her take on AI’s long-term impact on the economy and markets, and investing lessons learned from her own personal experience.
Today’s guest on The Long View is Callie Cox. Callie is the chief market strategist at Ritholtz Wealth Management, where she helps the firm’s clients make sense of markets and suss out signal in the noise. Callie’s clear, relatable approach to market commentary blends deep macroeconomic market insights with an understanding of investor behavior. Before joining Ritholtz Wealth Management in 2024, Callie was an investment analyst at eToro and previously worked in research roles at Ally, LPL Financial, and First Citizens Bank. She began her career as a reporter at Bloomberg, covering the stock and options markets after graduating from the University of North Carolina with a journalism degree.
“A Millennial’s Guide to Gen Z’s Career Apocalypse,” by Callie Cox, businessinsider.com, Oct. 27, 2025.
“The Wealth Effect,” by Callie Cox, optimisticallie.com, Nov. 10, 2025.
“Governments Are People, My Friend,” by Callie Cox, optimisticallie.com, Feb. 18, 2025.
“Big Tech’s AI Spending Spree,” by Callie Cox, optimisticallie.com, Oct. 27, 2025.
“Humans > Robots,” by Callie Cox, optimisticallie.com, Aug. 4, 2025.
“AI vs. Tariffs,” by Callie Cox, optimisticallie.com, May 19, 2025.
“How to Invest Without Going Insane,” by Callie Cox, optimisticallie.com, Nov. 3, 2025.
“Why You Should Invest Right Now,” by Callie Cox, optimisticallie.com, Sept. 15, 2025.
“The Seven Rules of Stock Market Bubbles,” by Callie Cox, optimisticallie.com, July 28, 2025.
The Psychology of Money: Timeless Lessons on Wealth, Greed, and Happiness, by Morgan Housel
(Please stay tuned for important disclosure information at the conclusion of this episode.)
Ben Johnson: Hi and welcome to The Long View. I’m Ben Johnson, head of client solutions with Morningstar.
Christine Benz: And I’m Christine Benz, director of personal finance and retirement planning for Morningstar.
Johnson: Today’s guest on The Long View is Callie Cox. Callie is the chief market strategist at Ritholtz Wealth Management, where she helps the firm’s clients make sense of markets and suss out signal in the noise. Callie’s clear, relatable approach to market commentary blends deep macroeconomic market insights with an understanding of investor behavior. Before joining Ritholtz Wealth Management in 2024, Callie was an investment analyst at eToro and previously worked in research roles at Ally, LPL Financial, and First Citizens Bank. She began her career as a reporter at Bloomberg, covering the stock and options markets after graduating from the University of North Carolina with a journalism degree.
Well, Callie, thank you so much for joining us on The Long View today. I wanted to start by asking you where your spark came from, specifically what first sparked your interest in global financial markets and ultimately led you down the path to a career in finance?
Callie Cox: First of all, Ben and Christine, I just want to say thanks for having me on. I’m a huge fan of Morningstar, all the valuable research that you put out to both everyday investors and then people in the industry like me. I’m really excited for this conversation. So, thank you for having me on. I know we’re going to talk about some interesting things.
What first sparked my interest in markets and money? I can actually trace it back to when I was seven or eight and I started reading the newspaper. I loved reading my local newspaper from cover to cover and the stock tickers page or the markets page was always something I gravitated toward just because there were a bunch of big numbers on it, especially Berkshire Hathaway, which was trading at like $50,000 a share back when I was young enough to look at a markets page in the newspaper. But I remember always being enthralled by the stock market and how it worked and how it was this nebulous system of sorts that some people knew a lot about, other people didn’t know a lot about. But I didn’t really get into investing and econ talk and really financial strategy until I was in college and I took a business journalism course. And I found that it was such an interesting mix of numbers and kind of qualitative thinking as well, numbers and colors, arts, and science. And I found that mixed to be really fascinating, because I was a numbers person in journalism school, but I also was very attuned to the context around me.
So, my first job was actually at Bloomberg. I was an intern and then I got hired through their internship program, and it was game over from there. I loved all the data. I was hooked. I got to meet some of the most interesting people in the financial industry, and I got to talk to some of the best strategists on the street. And I just loved how nobody could understand the stock market, not even the Warren Buffets of the world, but we were all trying anyway, trying to dissect the moves day after day. So, it really started when I was younger, and now that I’m older, I can kind of draw that path. But my experience at Bloomberg really sealed the deal for me there.
Benz: You made a change. You joined Ritholtz Wealth Management, what, a couple of years ago. Can you talk about what drew you to the firm?
Cox: Well, if you ask anybody at Ritholtz, they probably have the same story. I’ve been a fan of Ritholtz—Barry Ritholtz, Josh Brown, Michael Batnick, Ben Carlson—since I started in my career. I learned a lot from them just reading their blogs. And I got to know Josh actually through the media space because I was a reporter covering the stock market and the options markets for the first few years of my career. And I kept in touch with them. I moved into research. And I would argue, by the way, that what I did at Bloomberg was mostly research. My main thing was writing a column on implied volatilities for options traders who would primarily get their research from the terminal. So, research is a bit squishy. But what I was doing there was really institutional research. And I wanted to step further into that.
I found that I really enjoy the nitty-gritty data analysis side of the role. So, I stepped into research. I kept in touch with Ritholtz’s partners and founders. And I gained this affinity for everyday investors, explaining to them what’s going on. Because if you think about it, everyday investors are the ones that really need the guidance, and they need a clear explanation and a clear path on how to think about investing in their own terms. And the qualitative side of that gets even more important because obviously not every investor is the same, but everyday investors have just such a wide range of roles that I found that speaking to them was much more fulfilling for me and a challenge that I found a lot of value in.
So, I moved into brokerage side of research around 2018 or so. I worked at LPL for a bit. And that really grabbed my attention on how much help everyday investors needed, and advisors needed. And in a roundabout way, I was also staying in touch with Barry and Josh and Ben and Michael, sending them my research and learning from them as well. And it was only a matter of time. Ritholtz opened an office in Charlotte. Then I kind of shot my shot and I said, “Hey guys, I’m not looking to move jobs.” I was at eToro at the time. But I was like, “If you ever are thinking about beefing up your strategist presence or your research presence, let me know. I can write a communications or content plan for you because that’s essentially what the guts of this is.” And things worked out. We started our conversations. We realized that we both needed each other. And now I feel like I’m working in my dream job. I get to work with some of the smartest people in the industry, some of the best advisors in the industry; our advisors are superstars. And I get to teach as part of my job. I am a teacher just in a lot of different channels. But my job really boils down to talking about markets and teaching markets in interesting ways.
Johnson: Callie, I love that description of your role as a teacher really in essence. On a day-to-day basis, who is it you’re trying to teach? What are some of the core key lessons that you’re trying to convey to your pupils? And how do you think about that in the context of a market environment where no two days are the same, the lessons that we’re being served any given day might seem different, but point back to things that ideally, we would have learned in many cases years ago. How does that manifest in your work each and every day with either your team at Ritholtz or directly with your clients?
Cox: I love how you use the term pupils. And if I think about my class, my classroom, I would divide it into three main sections. I have our advisors, Ritholtz advisors; I have clients, our Ritholtz clients, which span people from $10 in their pockets to huge multifamily office billionaires, which is a really fun range to learn from because obviously the way that you talk about markets to a beginning investor isn’t the same as talking about markets to somebody who has already won the game. The third bucket here is prospects, the media, everybody else in the world. That’s like the grab bucket of sorts.
And we have a content strategy over at Ritholtz that addresses all three buckets and what they need to hear about, what they need to be informed about and how we go about doing it while not corroding the message or the investment philosophy that we’re talking about. But that’s what I love doing. I love thinking, obviously thinking critically about markets and investing in the context of how Ritholtz thinks about building portfolios and building wealth, but also finding creative ways to spread that message and really learning about what each bucket needs the most. Because when you boil it down, if you look at everything I’m saying and everything I’m writing across all three buckets, the meat of what we’re saying is the same. We’re just saying it a little bit differently and conveying our ideas a little bit differently.
And that’s what makes my job really interesting. It is a grab bag of sorts because you’re also dealing with markets that change every single day and seem to turn on a dime these days. So, it’s a lot of processing new information, a lot of figuring out exactly what’s going on, doing it with friends. I have one of the best research teams in the industry, I’m convinced of that. And then thinking of the best ways to talk about that with those three classrooms that I guess I’m leading. I’m really going to run with this teacher analogy now.
Benz: One thing I wonder about any market strategist role is how you balance the short term, the sort of ephemera coming at you about inflation and possible direction of interest rates and so forth with longer-term investing fundamentals? How do you reconcile those two sets of considerations?
Cox: It is one of the hardest parts of the job. And I believe not many strategists do it well because it is one of the hardest parts of the job. But I find it easy in the environment I’m in because, number one, Ritholtz has a strong, strong investment philosophy. We believe markets work over longer time frames. We serve longer-term clients. We have a bias toward value because we ultimately think a stable and consistent portfolio works for most investors. And we believe in simplicity over complexity. Everything is borne from those three bullet points I just told you.
So having that base makes it so much easier to work in the short-term context. And I think a lot of strategists shy away from the short-term context because understandably they say, my client is long term, so I asked them to ignore the short-term noise and focus on their goals, which is absolutely right. But in this day and age and considering the fact that we’re humans, not robots, we have brains that fire the alarms up based on the risk we see in front of us. You have to talk about the short-term moves. You can’t ignore them. I always found ignoring the short-term noise and focusing on 8% returns in the S&P 500 to be a bit shallow because as humans, we’re trying to make it through our lives day by day, and we can’t escape that noise that’s coming with us. So, we at least need enough information to contextualize it.
I find that balance to be really interesting, sometimes really hard to strike, but having that investment philosophy to lean back on is very, very helpful in talking about short-term moves because you ultimately pull it back to the investment philosophy. So, we don’t ignore it. We talk about it in the right context.
I think about different ways to talk about it considering my three buckets and practically what that looks like is when markets are moving or there’s a significant headline that comes out, I keep our advisors informed internally. They are on the beat of what’s happening in markets. I have these market alerts of sorts that I send to them over internal systems about what’s going on, what it means for our portfolios, the exact moves that we’re seeing in markets and how they can contextualize it for our clients. And then there’s a threshold when it comes to market moves and headline significance where I’ll create a client comm, but our advisors are the gatekeepers there. They have the ultimate discretion when it comes to who gets those client comms and who they want to have those conversations with.
And in media, I find this to be the easiest part because my background is journalism. I was a reporter. I was on the other side of the microphone. But in media, I talk about those short-term moves, but I always make sure to get our investment philosophy back in. And I’m not afraid to talk about how it is. The Fed is important to consider. The job market is important to consider. Earnings are important to consider. You need to be informed about these things but ultimately being informed versus making a decision based on these catalysts are two completely different things.
Johnson: Callie, when you do this work of trying to, I think, thread back to key signals and certainly the overarching investment philosophy of the firm, what do you find works well? What do you find most challenging? I think especially if you look at the current context and the news cycle seems to have gone beyond the speed of light. It seems to be like plaid speed any longer. It just feels like oftentimes many, even sometimes myself included, it can just get overwhelmed by the short-term oftentimes at the expense of those key signals in that all-important focus on what really matters over the long haul.
Cox: Well, we struggle with it too. I have this internal chat with me, my analysts, Matt Cerminaro and Sean Russo, Josh, Ben, Michael, a few other people, but we go back and forth constantly about the environment and how nothing makes sense, at least on a day-to-day perspective. It’s fun, it’s challenging, but sometimes it can be incredibly frustrating because ultimately, you’re the one that has to speak on behalf of what’s happening and how we’re thinking about it from a portfolio perspective. And look, markets are evolving so quickly. This is a very policy-burdened environment too. So, what the Fed says, what the White House says, what politicians say mean a lot in this environment.
You get a lot of back and forth and a lot of weekend stories, a lot of—let’s be honest, a lot of tariff threats that you have to contextualize but then understand that they could be walked back the next day. So, it’s a bit of a dance. It’s a bit of a dance, and I like to just go back to my framework. I know framework can be like a very vague word, but every good strategist has a good framework. It’s ultimately the principles they believe in and the signals that they pay the most attention to. It keeps you intellectually honest, so you’re not chasing the wind, which is an impossible exercise these days. And you sound grounded when you’re trying to work through what’s happening. Acknowledge the headlines, but ultimately you go back to your framework and your investment philosophy.
My framework is pretty simple. The job market is the engine of the economy. It’s the most important part of my framework. Part of the reason why in 2022, a lot of people were freaking out, but me and a few other strategists were pointing at the job market and saying, no way. Real incomes are growing way too quickly for this to be anything close to recession. Confidence and sentiment matter, which are very important these days. Sentiment, the market’s attitude, how fearful we are, what expectations we set relative to what news actually comes in. It’s really what you should be paying attention to on a day-to-day, week-to-week, month-to-month basis. Policy has to be supportive. The Fed and Congress need to be able to step in and help out if we do fall into a crisis, and then companies need to be able to borrow money. The corporate bond markets have to be working. The lending markets have to be working. Banks have to be working for this cycle to sustain itself.
So, I take those four principles, and I stick to them, and every headline that comes across, I run them through that filter. And you’ll see that in what I write and what I say publicly. I kind of repeat the same things over and over again, and that’s for a reason. I have my beliefs about markets. I know that my colleagues share these beliefs. I have the investment philosophy under it, and every piece of news gets filtered through that.
Benz: Callie, I wanted to follow up on the job market, which you mentioned is such a big part of your framework. We’ve been seeing news about job losses, white-collar job losses, in particular, AI-related job losses. Can you talk about that and how you’re thinking about that, both short and long-term? How do you think that will affect the economy as well as potentially the markets?
Cox: Well, it’s interesting because even the PhD-trained economists can’t agree on this. There’s so much conflicting information out there about AI and its economic benefits. So, what I start off with when I talk about this with clients is, AI is a compelling story, but it’s completely OK if it’s not adding significant economic benefits right now. You should refrain from trying to attach every story to AI because AI is a powerful force, but with innovations and technologies, it usually takes several years for them to show up significantly in the economy. Because when you think about businesses, for example, businesses have to learn about the technology. They have to apply the technology. The strategy has to grow, and then you get actual business effects and profits outside of that. So, this type of stuff takes time, even though markets reflect the AI trend at the speed of light. I feel like Nvidia and the “Magnificent Seven” are driving the markets day by day these days.
So, I always start with that. There are a lot of conflicting narratives around the job market right now. I’ve looked at the research. I think it’s really hard to point to any metric in the job market and say that it’s mainly driven by AI. I really think it boils down to the fact that we are just in a slowing economic environment. I think about the job market in two ways too. I think about hiring and firing. And hiring has been slowing for a while. We see that in payroll growth. We see that in consumer confidence and Americans’ perception of how easy it is to get a job right now. We see that in business confidence. I don’t think you can argue with that, but you also can’t really pull apart the narratives as easily as you think. You can through some qualitative information, but not every business leader is stepping out and saying we are cooling our hiring because of this.
On the other hand, layoffs are happening in the federal government. Layoffs are happening in some sectors just because they are a little more attached to the economy than others. But overall, layoffs are pretty contained at the moment. You couldn’t say that earlier this year, but based on the metrics I watch, layoffs have come down during the summer and during the early fall months.
So that seems to be the part of the teeter-totter that’s kind of keeping us stable here. People aren’t necessarily losing their jobs, but they aren’t finding their jobs easily either. Some of that cooling of hiring could be due to AI. No doubt that if you tried long enough, you could find an anecdote about that, especially in the tech industry. But for the most part, we’re seeing slowing across the board. We’re seeing a lot of uncertainty. Obviously, businesses have to deal with tariffs. Tariffs hit small- and medium-size businesses more than they hit larger businesses. Companies are in profit-margin protection mode at the moment. So, to me, that’s the overarching narrative, and there are reasons beyond that. You could probably pencil them in, but it’s really hard to paint them with a broad brush.
Johnson: Callie, I want to stick with the topic of AI and maybe just more broadly investors’ enthusiasm for all things AI and by extension, technology, the Mag Seven tech stocks. We’re recording this conversation on Oct. 29, Nvidia has just become the first-ever $5 trillion market-cap company. I checked it’s actually in and of itself bigger than the market cap of the entire Japanese stock market at this point, which is interesting. But is this an area where maybe the spend has gotten a little too loose? Expectations have gotten a little too lofty? You wrote about this recently on your own outlet, where your prolific OptimistiCallie and finished that piece with what I thought is really the money chart in this area, which just shows the increasing gap between the representation of these big firms with respect to their price representation in big indexes and then their contribution from an earnings perspective. And generally speaking, those things have tended to move in lockstep historically, but that gap indicates that maybe investors are getting ahead of themselves. What are you worried about or maybe why should we not be worried?
Cox: So, here I think you have to think about AI in concept and in theory and in practical ways to apply to your portfolio. So obviously, AI, again, a compelling story, I’m not an AI doomer. I think AI is going to have a lot of benefits for society and is already injecting those benefits into society, even if we’re not seeing it come through in economic data and profits just yet. But I think that’s what investors are struggling with right now. We hear all these exciting things about AI, all these exciting projects that seem to be happening among the tech hyperscalers, among infrastructure firms and data centers. But we’re not seeing the payoff there yet. It’s really easy to hear about a story and then dream about where it could go. But there isn’t much data to show what this could mean.
And right now, the data that we’re getting is how much these companies are spending on these projects, which I want to be clear: Tech companies are supposed to spend money on ambitious projects. They are tech companies. You’d rather them do that than pay you back in a dividend, which some tech companies do. But that’s not their main strategy. That’s not their main strategy. They are money spenders.
But at this point, we’re seeing spending ramp up among the biggest tech companies so quickly at a time when profit expectations are high, and valuations, think price/earnings ratio are also quite high. So, you have to wonder what the give and take is there. And I explain this in my newsletter. If these companies are spending so much money on AI projects that have yet to flow into profits and free cash flow, then your perception of these companies as Wall Street’s golden child of profitability and these big spenders that are trying to establish their next business strategies don’t really fit with each other. High spending, spending at these levels will ultimately cut into free cash flows. For some companies more than others, they’ll cut into cash on hand. They’ll force these companies to raise debt and then suddenly you can’t call tech the quality part of the market anymore. And it’s really hard to suss out how much of this valuation or how much of the prices they trade at are because they’re considered the quality profit generators in the market. So that’s the theory.
Practically, when we have clients who say, OK, well, what are you going to do about that? Like, interesting idea. Why does it matter to me? Practically, this is a sign for investors to look at value. It’s a sign to take profits, and I’m not talking about every tech stock you hold here. I’m talking about very gradual moves. But it’s a time to think about taking profits within tech and other highly valued stocks, especially knowing that underneath these tech companies we’re contending with a slowing economy that’s flashing some worrying signals at the moment. Take some profit in your tech stocks, rotate them into other value stocks, don’t divest completely from the stock market because that’s your engine to building wealth over time. Just be smart and practical about where you’re allocating your money. Maybe set some sector targets, for example, that help keep your portfolio looking like the amount of risk that you’re comfortable taking for your goals. And just be grounded about where we are right now. AI, again, incredibly compelling. You want exposure to it. But maybe things have gotten a little out of hand, and you can adjust and bubble proof your portfolio to respond to that.
Benz: Well, I wanted to follow up on that because when we look at fund flows, we see more and more investors are getting their US equity exposure through just a total market index where they are obviously very concentrated in those names that you think maybe they ought to be a little bit cautious about right now. So, what would be the other assets that you would add to a US equity portfolio? It sounds like value loud and clear, but how should investors be approaching their US equity exposure?
Cox: This is such a good question because like you mentioned, a lot of investors are passive index fund investors. I see it all the time in my work. One thing you should know, and it’s hard to put your finger on an exact number here because every ETF is different and they follow different strategies or every fund is different. But what you should know, if you’re invested in a no-fee hypothetical S&P 500 fund that just tracks the market caps of the stocks in the S&P 500, about a third of your portfolio is invested in these “Magnificent Seven” stocks at the moment. You are very, very tech heavy whether you realize it or intend to be or not. And just having that piece of information can help inform you as to what you need to add in or what you need to tweak in your portfolio to make it a little more attuned to your own risk tolerances.
What you do there is ultimately up to you. There are value funds that you can look at. There are dividend stock funds you can look at. There are defensive funds you can look at. So, what that could look like in your portfolio is maybe trimming a little bit off the top of those S&P funds or those passive funds to an allocation that you pinpoint beforehand. I wouldn’t do this by feel. Maybe rotating it into more defensive and value stocks. As time goes on using calendar-controlled strategy, I’ll sell a little bit this month and rotate it into this fund. And also considering that there are assets outside of the stock market. There are bonds, there are gold, there’s cash. If you have short-term spending needs coming up, then it can’t hurt to take some chips off the table and sell a little bit of your S&P fund to move it to cash to pay for those spending needs. But just know that you have a lot of options outside of the S&P fund, and right now, the S&P by nature is getting, it’s getting riskier at a time when the economy is slowing. So, it’s probably smart to be a little more tactical and active on that front.
Johnson: I want to switch gears a bit and talk a little bit about what we’re just beginning to see in some corners of the market play out with respect to a new form of old behavioral psychological patterns among investors. And I think this is manifested in any number of different ways. There are hordes of folks on Reddit threads that have basically perpetuated the existence of entire entities like AMC and facilitated their purchase of gold miners. Never in my lifetime did I think that a movie theater would buy a gold mine thanks to some help from people out there in social media.
Cox: Really? You didn’t predict that?
Johnson: No, it was not on my bingo card. But I’m just curious …
Cox: I don’t think it was on anybody’s bingo card.
Johnson: Oh, good. I’m not alone. But how are you seeing that play out? Is this something that your own clients pick up on and comes up in conversation? How do you think about adjusting—you mentioned your filters before—your own filters, in light of just all of these changes by which information is in some cases artificially created and ultimately digested by markets day in, day out?
Cox: Well, we definitely get questions about it, even if it’s just what’s going on here. I find it interesting when we have clients who come in with concentrated positions because they’ve been long-term employees in a company or I’ve just built up those positions over time and then maybe that stock turns into a meme stock, maybe that stock is blown around by more short-term factors and suddenly a big piece of their wealth is being affected by headlines or market sentiment or traders. That’s always an interesting conversation to work through. And that’s part of the reason why if we see a concentrated portfolio, we try to work out of that pretty quickly. We have some tools on our end that we can use to achieve that.
I think with meme stocks, what you have to understand is that number one, people can do whatever they want with their money. I will never judge somebody for taking a bit of their money and putting it into meme stocks just because they want to enjoy the ride or very best with friends and family or keep along with the headlines or with an online social community. Would I do that with my money? No. Is that part of Ritholtz’s investment philosophy? No. But from somebody with a brokerage background, I really try to stay intellectually open to what people want to do with their own money. I will never poo-poo that.
Even if you are a wealth client of ours, we always support having a play account or a little bit of money off to the side if it scratches that itch for you because investing can be a tool for learning. But of course, it does become really difficult when meme stocks and other stocks start swinging around a lot, especially in ways you don’t expect because, of course, if you knew every headline in advance, you wouldn’t be able to predict how markets would react to that headline. It’s all about expectations.
So, when it comes to moving into meme stocks, understanding why stocks move the way they do and what it means for your own portfolio, I’m a big believer in setting targets. Maybe I buy the stock for $30. I’m happy with my investment if it rises to $40. That means that I’ll sell right off the bat. I buy the stock at $30. I think the stock price of $20 is maybe too low or where I wouldn’t feel comfortable holding the stock anymore. So, I sell at $20. Always pull your objectives back to the numbers, either your own numbers or really only your own numbers and the targets that you set for yourself. But when it comes to behavioral twinges, we firmly believe that some of the biggest mistakes you can make on your investing journey are when markets are moving around and you make emotional decisions. So, no matter if you’re a long-term investor, if you’re a short-term trader in meme stocks, trying to keep up with your friends, just know that setting targets can be one of the best things you can do because you are hopefully setting them when you’re in a more grounded state of mind. And they are quantitative goals that you can stick to, especially when markets don’t feel quantitative and everything feels crazy, and your emotions are eating up at you and your brain is signaling that risk is ahead.
Benz: Do you think social media has helped or hurt investor behavior overall or do you think it’s a neutral presence, not a big issue?
Cox: Social media has been an unequivocally good thing for investing. It’s more information. It’s more access. That is good for every type of investor. I will hold that line until I’m in my grave. It does require you to have a stronger filter. It can make you more emotional. You have to process a lot more signal, or I’d say a lot more noise with a little signal in it. So, in a way, I’d imagine it’s made our behavior a little more rash and it’s made decision-making a little more important.
But that’s something you can overcome as an investor, too. If you have that smart rules-driven process that’s focused on targets and goals and allocations and—if you want to throw in a framework there too, I love a good framework—then you have the tools you need to participate in social media, process this noise that’s coming through, and then ultimately understand what you need to do because you already have that plan laid out.
One thing we do at Ritholtz actually is that, like any advisor, we build a financial plan for somebody, but we are very rules-based from how we build our financial plans to how we manage our portfolios to how we consider making changes to those portfolios. And we take a lot of pride in that. We believe that markets work. We believe that history is great evidence about what could happen in the future, and we really stick to that. So that’s one thing that we emphasize when the noise is especially loud, or markets are moving especially quickly.
We have these rules already set out for you in your financial plan with some allocated wiggle room if you really need it and we can visit that, but you have to trust us to stick to this plan and these rules because these are important especially during volatile times.
Johnson: Callie, I’m curious related to just the emergence of various forms of social media as a platform for information dissemination and consumption. What sort of patterns do you see across your clientele, across generations with respect to their media diets, the degree of trust they put in different platforms, or central platforms versus their peers, Wall Street Journal versus Reddit message boards? And what do you think the long-term implications of some of these shifts might be?
Cox: Well, I want to go back on our clients for a second. We get a lot of clients coming through our door because they heard Josh on CNBC. They heard Barry on Bloomberg. They read Ben and Michael’s or my blogs. They listened to The Compound. So, typically we get a more sophisticated client anyway, and clients that actually do believe in our investment philosophy before they realize they do, they read a Ben blog and they say, wow, investing for the long term makes so much sense because yes, pullbacks happen, but they tend to recover within two years to five years—we’re talking bear markets here.
So, they come in and they say, “Hey, I believe in everything you’re saying. I would love for you to manage my money. What does that entail? What am I getting into?” And ultimately, what we speak about and what we believe when it comes to markets is what we believe on the portfolio side. So, our clients tend not to panic as much during drawdowns, but hey, we’re all humans. We have lizard brains that react to risk just because risk is something that our brains are wired to react to.
So, when it comes to news diets and sources, we definitely see a lot more of a gravitational pull toward politically biased publications to theories that you see on the internet. But our clients are also smart enough that they’ll bring them to us or they’ll bring them to the advisors and typically we can talk to them and work them through what they’re seeing and what actually matters.
One of my favorite conversations with a client to this day has been an hourlong conversation about how the Fed works and how the Fed makes decisions. And it was this grounded factual, basically back and forth between me and him on how did the Fed start. Who is the Fed? We hear about Jay Powell, but the Fed really is a board of people. It’s a committee and a board. What does the Fed actually do? How are those people appointed? How often do decisions happen? When have decisions gone wrong? We really just try to ground our clients with facts there. And lucky for us, they trust us as a source for those facts.
But overall, I think the strings that are pulling on society, we ultimately see them pulling on our clients as well. And that’s totally fine. Like I said, we’re all human. It’s just what you do after that. You hear the noise, you process it. How do you ultimately apply that to your investing strategy? That’s where we come in.
Benz: I wanted to follow up on the client interaction piece and how you get to know clients, how you work with clients. I wonder if there’s sometimes kind of a mismatch with your firm, people like you and Josh are so out there in terms of being visible. Do clients ever come in the door saying, wait, no, I wanted Josh to be my advisor or I want Callie to be my advisor? How do you set client expectations around who is doing what there?
Cox: We get that question a lot. A lot of our leads come through Josh being on CNBC, and Josh is a market wizard. He talks about all different kinds of stocks. He is one of the most well-researched people I know, which is incredible because he also has this big, wild job as CEO of a $6 billion RIA and that includes a lot of hats that he has to wear. So, this is something we talk about often. Josh is the CEO. He doesn’t sit on the investment committee. We’ve intentionally drawn that divide with his feedback in mind and that was done early on at the firm. But it is a question we get because he is one of the best vocal members of the team.
Barry is the same way. Even though Barry does sit on the investment committee, and he is the CIO, we have people coming in and saying, “I want Barry to manage my money.” That’s a little bit easier because Barry isn’t as deep into the single stock and more individual name world. But that happens a lot, especially when you have almost like a personality-led brand.
Ultimately, we see it as a teaching moment. Our advisors are adept at having that first conversation and saying, hey, we’re happy to help you. We probably have a service tier that fits you because, because like I said, if you have $10 in your pocket, we have liftoff. We have a robo-advisor with financial advice or advisor engagement that actually fits perfectly for your needs. But our advisors are so adept at saying, hey, we can bring you in here. We can teach you about how we think about investing. But just know that it’s a lot more dynamic than the five minutes that you’re seeing of Josh on CNBC or 10 minutes that you’re seeing of Josh on CNBC. You can be interested in markets. You can be intellectually stimulated by markets. But when it comes to reaching your goals, that requires a whole different rules-based plan that encompasses your investments, your taxes, your estate. It really is just every piece of your financial plan that you have to consider when you’re making what seems like isolated decisions about your investments.
So, like I said, our advisors are great. That’s a question we get a lot. But ultimately, we find that it is a good way to open the door to talk about our firm investment philosophy and how we structure this well-thought-out financial plan for our clients.
Johnson: Callie, I want to land our conversation on, call it the “lessons were learned section.” And I’m curious for you personally, if there’s a career or a lesson about markets that you’ve learned during your years keeping close tabs on markets the hard way, which is often, at least in my experience, one of the best ways to really internalize, albeit painfully, key lessons.
Cox: Agreed. Agreed. I’m very publicly vocal about what I’ve gone through in my personal life and overcoming some cognitive biases that I have stemming from childhood. I could talk about career lessons all day. I worked at, I think Ritholtz is my eighth firm in a span of 14 years. Trying to do the math in my head. It’s not connecting. But I’ve jumped around in the industry a lot. Ultimately, I think that’s been a benefit because I’ve been able to learn from so many amazing people. And I’ve been in so many different roles that have really shown me the angles that not a lot of people get to see when it comes to money management and how companies work and how brokerages work.
For example, I was telling one of my advisors yesterday about how I worked in Treasury at a regional bank. And one of my roles there was to sit and regulate our meetings and take notes, which was not a fun role. It was very boring. But I learned so much about stress-testing at banks and decision-making at banks that has helped so much, believe it or not, in my role here. Understanding how mortgage rates work, understanding how Dodd-Frank really has kept a lid on capital needs, I’ll say, and credit risk. Everything is connected in markets. And it’s really interesting to see how the sausage is made across different channels because there are little dots you can draw between them. So, it’s not easy to switch jobs, but I’ve definitely treated my career like a jungle gym, and I think it’s ultimately helped out.
Financial lesson that goes back to the fact that money biases have roots that run really deep. And if you want to figure out why you think the way you do about money, it’s going to require some painful introspection about your first memories of money and you’re my story and how you started investing and why you make the decisions you do. I have publicly said that I am good at money in some ways, but I’m way too risk-averse. And that’s something that I know will take a while for me to overcome. That’s not necessarily a mistake, but it’s a lesson that I’m slowly learning, especially right now when I’m pregnant with twins. And it feels like I’m hemorrhaging money left and right trying to set up a whole life and childcare for them.
But I’ll tie a bow on this by saying, don’t be afraid of learning lessons. When you’re uncomfortable, you’re growing. I had a boss who said that to me and I try to keep that on a sticky note on my computer because, there are times when finances can be uncomfortable, when you have to share things that you’re not proud of or when you have to be real with somebody about why you’re thinking about a certain spending decision the way you are or why you’re prioritizing maybe investing over saving right now. But ultimately, you learn from those decisions, from those conversations, and you have to be real with yourself or else you’re not going to be able to take any steps forward when it comes to these biases.
Benz: You’ve referenced how you love working with Josh and Barry and the rest of the team. Can you talk about the thinkers or mentors or even books that have most influenced how you think about investing, maybe stepping away from the Ritholtz firm and talk about outside of that?
Cox: So I’m going to give you the lamest answer right off the bat. I took CFA level one several years ago. I studied for CFA level two, never took the test because my career took me in a different direction. But CFA materials have been so impactful in how I think about and contextualize what’s going on in markets. It sounds so obvious, but I can’t tell you how often I have to revisit my materials or my fact sheet to really think through some like heady context-filled decisions that we face on the portfolio side or the client side or understanding products that we’re bringing on at Ritholtz. So, God, it’s so lame that I put the CFA first as my mentor or my inspiration when it comes to content.
I’ll give you better answers. So, I really like Morgan Housel’s writing. Who doesn’t? The Psychology of Money is just such a great book. It helps bring a little more art into this area that everybody sees a lot of science in. And I also think I’m in my role just because I’ve had the opportunity to learn from some extraordinary macro thinkers. When I was a reporter, I was constantly calling up strategists. The people that you see on CNBC and on Bloomberg, I was calling them up day after day and asking them what they were seeing in markets, what they were thinking. And that exercise that was crucial to my job, because that’s ultimately how I wrote stories, became so important in me getting kind of dialed into how really smart people think about the environment in front of them. So, I got to talk to James Paulsen, who was the chief strategist at Wells Fargo Asset Management. I got to talk to John Manley, who was a strategist for another Wells Fargo division. He had a great imprint on me as a journalist.
From there, I’ve learned a lot from David Kelly. I’ve learned a lot from Howard Marks. David Kotok. Obviously, Barry—I got to come back in the firm—Barry is one of the most interesting macro thinkers that I’ve encountered throughout my career. But I really try to keep this routine of just reading, reading, reading. Whenever my favorite macro thinker puts something out, I digest it immediately. And I’m not afraid to change my priors to lean into that strong beliefs loosely held line that everybody talks about. But I feel like I’ve just been the luckiest and most fortunate person because I’ve had access to all these smart thinkers for most of my career.
Johnson: Well, Callie, I would say even as a CFA charter holder myself, I did not have the beginning of your response being CFA level one materials on my bingo card.
Cox: You’re trying to get brownie points here.
Johnson: So, on behalf of CFA Institute we appreciate the hat tip. I wanted to finish by asking you if you could give one single piece of advice to a new investor that’s just starting out today, maybe making their first-ever contribution to an employer-sponsored 401(k) plan, what would it be?
Cox: I’m going to keep it very simple here. Just do it. Take the first step. You have no excuse. Many brokerages don’t have minimums or commissions. If you have $10 in your pocket, you can come to Ritholtz, and we’ll teach you how to invest your money through liftoff. Just take the first step. That’s a huge mental hurdle, and you just have to do it.
Johnson: I love that. Well, Callie, thank you so much for joining Christine and I today. We really enjoyed this conversation, and I know for a fact our listeners will, too.
Cox: Thank you for having me. There’s lots to think about here and yeah, I’m sure we’ll be talking a lot about this in the months to come.
Benz: Thanks so much, Callie. You were great.
Johnson: Thank you for joining us on The Long View. If you could, please take a moment to subscribe to and rate the podcast on Apple Music, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.
You can follow me on social media at Ben Johnson, CFA on LinkedIn or @MstarBenJohson on X.
Benz: And at @Christine_Benz on X or Christine Benz on LinkedIn.
Johnson: George Castady is our engineer for the podcast and Kari Greczek produces the show notes each week.
Finally, we’d love to get your feedback. If you have a comment or a guest idea, please email us at TheLongView@Morningstar.com. Until next time, thanks for joining us.
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