Become a Better Investor’s Top 5 Bloggers 2017

By Become a Better Investor | November 30, 2017 |

Yesterday, we revealed the close contenders to our blogging medal-winners. Today, things are getting real and we crown the heavyweight champions of Become a Better Investor’s Top 5 Bloggers 2017.

With the post that finalizes our rankings published on November 17, we have calculated that we featured 265 articles from more than 105 investment bloggers this year alone. This adds up to just 828 bullets points in total! (And that’s all before December!) So, as you can see, it’s not easy to make it into the exclusive club of Become a Better Investor’s Top 5 Bloggers.

Check out the stats! The Top 5 Bloggers accounted for 36% of all the bullet points published in our weekly newsletters. This is a whopping increase of 13.8 percentage points from last year! You might need a magnifying glass to see the twitter handles in the chart below, but we wanted to fit in all 105 great authors.

This year, you’ll see some familiar faces among the medal winners. Check out our list below of the Top 5 Bloggers for 2017 out of the 105 investment writers we have featured this year, along with our favorite takeaways from them. Huge congratulations to these brilliant authors!

Spread some financial knowledge and happiness by congratulating these fine investment writers! It’s no harder than clicking on one of the share buttons in each of the blogger’s images below.

5. The Collaborative Fool Morgan Housel

Share of total bullet points: 4.35%

Blog: Collaborative Fund

Placed in 2016: Silver medalist

Morgan Housel is a partner at The Collaborative Fund, though we began to share many of his posts while he was writing for The Motley Fool back in the days. We like his pragmatic investing ideas and engaging style of writing.

Our Top 5 Takeaways from Morgan in 2017:

Running a public company is a heavy burden for any CEO, especially as they are tasked with concentrating on short-term actions to satisfy the market and shareholders (Read Full Article)
Investors will have more faith in your funds and practice if you don’t attempt to hide any past errors in judgment but instead, stand up and admit to them (Read Full Article)
Just as in gambling and business, the key to achieving success with investing is to survive extended periods of losing (Read Full Article)
Many investing strategies run the same level of risk over very different time periods, and high risk in short time frames is only paid for in increased stress and anxiety (Read Full Article)
We base a lot of our decision-making factors for future risk on past events, but it is the cultural element which is more persuasive than the analytical element (Read Full Article)

5. The Reformed Broker Josh Brown

Share of total bullet points: 4.35%

Blog: The Reformed Broker

Placed in 2016: 4th

CEO of Ritholtz Wealth Management, Joshua is well-renowned in the investment blogging world. Barron’s, The Wall Street Journal, and TIME Magazine have all ranked Josh as the number one finance guy to follow on social media. He has also written the popular books Backstage Wall Street and Clash of the Financial Pundits.

Our Top 5 Takeaways from Josh in 2017:

Bubbles tend to come about though from an overenthusiastic surge behind stocks in a single sector before the popularity of the trend takes a sudden about-turn (Read Full Article)
On the downside, we have a market of high valuation stocks, but on the plus side the global economy is recovering, and the Fed delaying normalizing rates mean we have a few choices available (Read Full Article)
People are investing speculatively: This is by no means new information, look back at historic data and you will always find examples of them doing this (Read Full Article)
While everyone is attempting to predict the end of the bull market, there is actually no reliable formula, strategy or machine that can possibly calculate it (Read Full Article)
There are more “plastic bears” in the financial world than ever before; these are noted investors/fund houses who speak of bubble concerns while holding “large amounts of the asset class they claim to hate” (Read Full Article)

4. Barry Ritholtz

Share of total bullet points: 4.7%

Blog: The Big Picture

Placed in 2016: Close Contender

Barry Ritholtz is the Co-Founder and Chief Investment Officer of Ritholtz Wealth Management and the author of Bailout Nation. Many of the bloggers in this list and the close contenders list actually work for this company, as you may have already noticed. We’ve often featured Barry’s articles published on Bloomberg View. Great to see you making it from the close contenders’ circle to joining the Top 5 this year, Barry!

Our Top 5 Takeaways from Barry in 2017:

Making any prediction about the future is estimation at best, there is nothing “factual” involved—opinions are just that, a perception only (Read Full Article)
Until you consider greater depths of context within your process, then you’re working on mere guesswork—which can result in expensive mistakes (Read Full Article)
There is a lot of research to show that trying to beat the market—or a specific benchmark—is hard to do consistently (Read Full Article)
The dominance of the Internet in our lives has drastically changed the way we share and interpret data analysis and opinions on investing (Read Full Article)
With so many online investment writers and blogs available, it’s difficult for investors to steer through financial media and be able to discern truth from noise (Read Full Article)

3. The Irrelevant Investor Michael Batnick

Share of total bullet points: 5.1%

Blog: The Irrelevant Investor

Placed in 2016: 4th

Michael Batnick, CFA, is Director of Research at Ritholtz Wealth Management and even though his blog is called The Irrelevant Investor, he is anything but irrelevant in his contribution to investment blogging. Welcome on up to the podium, Michael! We’re very much looking forward to your book, Big Mistakes: The Best Investors and Their Worst Investments.

Our Top 5 Takeaways from Michael in 2017:

Investors should not just diversify their asset classes but reassess strategies consistently and ensure they’re diversified also (Read Full Article)
Stocks have become more expensive, and studies show the more they cost, the average drawdown on them becomes deeper too (Read Full Article)
In the last nine years, there has been an extensive list of headlining events in the stock market that have given us reasons to sell stocks rather than keep them (Read Full Article)
Investing is an intensely personal ordeal; the driving force behind our search for optimal returns is not just the data but our emotions (Read Full Article)
No matter where the market is headed, the only way to survive it is to control and rein in your own behavior (Read Full Article)

2. The Intelligent Investor Jason Zweig

Share of total bullet points: 5.2%

Blog: A Safe Haven for Intelligent Investors

Placed in 2016: Close Contender

Jason Zweig is a writer with a lot of experience. He has worked as a financial columnist, editor, and he wrote the books Your Money and Your Brain (which is just amazing!), The Devil’s Financial Dictionary (which is both hilarious and educational!), and many other recognizable titles. He publishes a lot of articles online on The Wall Street Journal and his own blog, A Safe Haven for Intelligent Investors.

Our Top 5 Takeaways from Jason in 2017:

If you always factor in the financial tenets of Murphy’s Law as an investor, you can only go so wrong (Read Full Article)
As humans, we endlessly search for patterns where there aren’t necessarily any, in investing and life (Read Full Article)
Rather than allowing others to influence you, be sure to undertake your own rigorous analysis before making an investment decision (Read Full Article)
Quantitative models alone are not a reliable reflection of human behavior and unpredictability in markets—match computer analysis and modeling with your own judgment for best results (Read Full Article)
Investors should accept that even in a hundred years no single person can figure out the key to how the stock market works (Read Full Article)

1. A Wealth of Common Sense from Ben Carlson

Share of total bullet points: 12.3%

Blog: A Wealth of Common Sense

Placed in 2016: Winner

Ben Carlson, CFA is the Director of Institutional Asset Management at Ritholtz Wealth Management. He is maybe more famous for his blog, A Wealth of Common Sense and his book, A Wealth of Common Sense: Why Simplicity Trumps Complexity in Any Investment Plan. This year he published his second book, Organizational Alpha: How to Add Value in Institutional Asset Management. We like Ben’s writing as it’s no-nonsense; it’s actually… a whole lot of common sense. Congratulations on winning for the second year in a row!

Our Top 5 Takeaways from Ben in 2017:

Investing isn’t always about trying to find the next big thing all the time; it’s about good portfolio management too; sound construction and managing your risk levels well (Read Full Article)
The real strategy for successful long-term investing is saying no repeatedly and using a filter to help you turn down the wrong investment ideas (Read Full Article)
When advising on the correct fund for your clients, tailor them to meet their individual specifications—one they are likely to commit to with relative ease (Read Full Article)
There is no way to predict the irrationality of markets because humans/investors are behind all the trades, and we’re renowned for being senseless at times (Read Full Article)
Depending on how you interpret and present financial data you can show almost anything you want, but what will always come out is the cyclical nature of markets (Read Full Article)

DISCLAIMER: This content is for information purposes only. It is not intended to be investment advice. Readers should not consider statements made by the author(s) as formal recommendations and should consult their financial advisor before making any investment decisions. While the information provided is believed to be accurate, it may include errors or inaccuracies. The author(s) cannot be held liable for any actions taken as a result of reading this article. The Become a Better Investor Team doesn’t necessarily endorse any stocks or shares mentioned in the articles or the author of such articles linked to and summarized in Top 5 of the Week and cannot guarantee the accuracy of its information.

Posted in Top 5 of the Week