The CFA Society of Victoria brings one of the world’s most provocative wealth managers, Barry Ritholz to Oak Bay for what the CFA describes as “an entertaining evening of ideas, drinks, and eats.”
Ritholtz is the co-founder and chief investment officer of Ritholtz Wealth Management, a firm with more than $470 million in assets.
Ritholtz’s presentations are a draw because if his unusual and often irreverent view of the financial world.
For example, Ritholtz is of the opinion that most don’t understand risk.
He’s argued that it’s because our brains are hard-wired by an evolutionary past, a past in which a failure to consider the risks presented by hungry predators meant our DNA, rather than being passed along to future generations, became a part of someone else’s lunch. That hard-wiring,he said, does us a disservice in today’s world
He refers to our fascination with sharks as an example.
In 2014 Ritholtz examined our preoccupation with these perfectly evolved eating machines and pointed out that, despite our morbid preoccupation with the creatures, they were responsible for fewer than a dozen deaths per year.
“Mosquitoes, on the other hand, take out almost three-quarters of a million humans a year by spreading a variety of deadly diseases,” wrote Ritholtz.
He went on to point out that heart disease was more than 35,000 times more likely to kill you than a terrorism attack.
Ritholtz maintains the same irrational behaviour and fears impact the way we invest. It’s the little things…the quiet, unnoticed factors…that will kill your investment strategy, and not the catastrophic market crashes and upheavals investors tend to fear, he argues.
These observations and others have made Ritholtz a favourite commentator on financial matters. His widely read weblog The Big Picture regularly generate several million web-views a month and his podcast on Bloomberg Radio has become one of the organization’s most popular.
The CFA presentation Crashes, Terrorists & Sharks is at the Oak Bay Beach Hotel on May 11 at 5 p.m. Visit CFAVictoria.com for more details and ticket information.
