Well, that was a lot more fun than I expected!
I submitted the final manuscript for my new book, How Not to Invest, last week. The final edit will involve some back-and-forth, but the writing is finished.
I recall “Bailout Nation” as more of a slog, in part because so much of it happened in real-time. I constantly rewrote entire chapters as various companies blew up. There was always this time pressure, and since it was my first book, I had little idea what I was doing other than expanding various blog posts into full-length chapters.
HNTI was a very different experience. This book was joyous to write for a few reasons:
First, it was a giant puzzle that I had to figure out how to put together. It’s not easy to distill your entire investing philosophy into a single work. What do you include? What do you leave out? How do you best bring three decades of your prior writings into the 2020s? My trick was to sneak in the investing lesson by showing some really bad outcomes—not only in finance but in many other fields. Figuring that out was, surprisingly, a lot of fun.
Second, we all put ideas out into the world and hope for the best. It was fun to revisit some prior concepts to see what has stood the test of time and then to flesh those ideas out more fully. Seeing these examples of bad behavior from a historical perspective was really eye-opening. I cherry-picked the worst outcomes because they were both instructive and amusing. (This is a target-rich area.)
Third, Morgan Housel (Psychology of Money) and Craig Pearce of Harriman House had been encouraging me to write this book for a few years, but I didn’t initially see either a useful or new & different approach. The reality is after more than a century of books instructing people how to invest, most of us remain mediocre at the task at best. My insight was avoiding all of the usual errors was a better approach than laying out all of the “How to’s.” Channeling Charley Ellis and Charlie Munger was the key to coming up with this line of attack.
I am really proud of this.
Sure, you always want another six months to massage, edit, and polish it, but at a certain point, you have to let it go.
The book will have its own website at hownottoinvestbook.com.* (You’ll be able to order the book from all of the major book retailers there.) If you want to learn more about how the book was made, any related media appearances, background, ask questions, get special bonus material, etc., you can sign up here: HNTI -at- RitholtzWealth.com
And please, pre-order a copy today!
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* Until that site goes live in January, the redirect will be to the posts at HNTI category at the blog: https://ritholtz.com/category/how-not-to-invest/
