Brutally honest guide to not losing money in the market

If you could tell me something in the next fifteen minutes that would make me a better investor, what's the first point you would just hammer into my head? Oh my god. Put the phone down. Stop trading. I feel like I can rule the world. I know I could be what I want to. I put my all in it like the day's off on the road. Let's travel never get back. I think the interesting place to start is we've had a few different people from the school of investing wisdom come on, sort of the value investing genealogy. And me and Sam, although we are not investors, we're definitely, like, entrepreneurs first and then, you know, investing as a sort of hobby sport type of thing. We're so attracted to it. We love the sort of investment wisdom, especially especially the your version, which is the the aw shucks common sense version of investing, which is less about how to be super smart and do advanced things and just how to be less stupid than you already are. And don't worry. You'll be fine. And so, I'm excited to talk to you. You have a cool story. You, you started off really in the content game, in the media game, blogging back in GeoCities early on with podcasting and built a large, investment advisory shop, called, named after yourself. I think you guys got to what? That was a placeholder, by the way. That was not supposed to be permanent. Like, let's just call it Ritholtz for now, someone else said, and we'll find a better name, and then we never found a better name. The background is, go to law school, do really well, hate being a lawyer. A client is running a trading desk that was a predecessor shop to E*Trade. And so I started on a trading desk and found it was just mayhem. It was just random and and volatile, and I was more fascinated by why the people around me some days were killing it, some days were getting killed. Like, what's going on with their process? And that sent me down the rabbit hole of, behavioral finance. It just was the only explanation I found as to why the same person could be doing really well one week and applying the same process gets shellacked the next week. It's decision making. It's emotions. It's, cognitive biases. Can you explain your, Christmas tree analogy for for constructing a portfolio? Sure. That's really easy. So we know that, historically, very few people beat the index on a regular basis. In any given year, less than half of active managers beat their index. You take that to five year, it's something like 21%. You take it to ten years, it's it's less than 10%. One out of 10 people. So that includes, like, huge firms. Includes everybody at any active mutual fund, ETF, hedge fund, whatever. And then go to twenty years, and it's …