Barry Ritholtz
Barry Ritholtz uses a macro perspective on capital markets, the economy, geopolitics, technology, and digital media to organize and explain the daily flow of financial news. At The Big Picture, he blends investor behavior, market history, and policy analysis into recurring reading lists, interviews, and essays that keep his audience oriented through shifting market cycles. His coverage stands out for its consistent investor-centric lens and long-running archive that connects current headlines to decades of market experience.
Morning Reads and Weekend Roundups
The backbone of Ritholtz’s output is a steady series of curated link roundups such as “10 Monday AM Reads,” “10 Tuesday AM Reads,” “10 Wednesday AM Reads,” and “10 Weekend Reads.”
These pieces open with a short, situational introduction - noting the day’s context, a holiday, or a market event - and then move directly into a tightly edited set of links to external reporting and research. The subjects in these roundups range from inflation and the cost of living to labor markets, housing, corporate earnings, and broader economic trends, always framed around what matters for investors and markets.
He frequently highlights work on topics like office-return dynamics, recessions that did not materialize, rent increases by county, and the impact of years of inflation on prices, giving readers a cross-beat view of how the economy is evolving. These posts are highly regular, often appearing multiple times per week and across weekends, creating a rhythm where his audience can expect a synthesized view of the most important external stories rather than a single-issue deep dive.
Masters in Business Interviews and Transcripts
Alongside the roundups, Ritholtz publishes interviews and full transcripts from his long-form conversations with senior figures in finance and business.
Recent examples include discussions with Glen Kacher of Light Street Capital, Seth Bernstein of AllianceBernstein, and Vimal Kapur of Honeywell, among others. These pieces are structured as extended Q&A sessions that explore investment philosophy, capital allocation, technology, and the experience of managing large organizations through changing market conditions.
The transcripts are presented in full, giving access to the nuance of each guest’s thinking, rather than the selective quotes typical of a short news story. Ritholtz’s questions tend to connect current market issues with longer-term history and behavior - how founders build companies, how investors respond to manias, how policy changes ripple through portfolios - reinforcing his focus on the decision-making environment faced by investors.
This interview work complements his daily curation and positions him as a bridge between institutional decision-makers and the broader investing public.
Investor Behavior, Manias, and Policy Failures
Ritholtz returns repeatedly to themes of investor behavior, financial manias, and policy mistakes, reflecting his early embrace of behavioral economics and market psychology. His archive features coverage of phenomena like the Bitcoin boom, GameStop-style short squeezes, SPAC cycles ending in bankruptcies and fire sales, and surges of new retail investors entering markets.
In these pieces, he connects contemporary episodes to earlier historical examples, showing how speculative dynamics and crowd behavior recur across eras. Regular features under rubrics like “Avert your eyes!” focus on incompetency, corruption, and policy failures, tying political decisions and regulatory missteps back to their consequences for markets and investors.
He uses charts, historical references, and cross-links to other sources to make the case that many investment errors and policy blunders stem from predictable human biases rather than purely rational analysis. This behavioral and historical framing is a defining characteristic of his coverage and distinguishes his work from beat reporters who focus more narrowly on quarterly data or single companies.
Personal Finance, Wealth, and At The Money
Beyond markets and macro, Ritholtz devotes a portion of his work to personal finance and the realities of wealth accumulation.
At The Big Picture, he runs the “At The Money” series, with recent installments examining who is wealthy in America, how they became rich, and the role of investing in founder-led companies for ordinary investors. These pieces combine data on wealth distribution with practical investment implications, framing personal finance decisions in the context of broader economic structures.
His long history of writing columns on personal finance and investing for major outlets reinforces this orientation toward helping individuals navigate markets, not just interpreting them from afar.
Across the site, he also addresses asset allocation, inflation’s impact on savings, and common behavioral errors that destroy wealth, tying back to themes he develops in longer-form work on how not to invest. The result is a coverage pattern where macro analysis, curated news, and investor education all support the same goal: equipping readers to understand markets well enough to make better financial decisions.
Ritholtz’s long tenure running The Big Picture, dating back to the early 2000s, gives him a deep archive and continuity that few finance writers match. He maintains an active presence on social platforms, pushing out his “10 AM Reads” and “At The Money” pieces and directing followers back to his site and podcast.
For stories touching investor behavior, market history, policy failures, or the intersection of macroeconomics and personal finance, his coverage is driven less by breaking news and more by synthesis and context built over many years of daily work.
4 more finance journalists.
Abigail Summerville
Abigail Summerville brings a leveraged finance background to her work covering consumer and retail mergers and acquisitions for Reuters. She reports on deal-making and capital markets across food, beverages, spirits, personal care, skincare, bath products and pet food. Her stories focus on transaction terms, ownership stakes, valuation, debt structures and funding sources. She often breaks news on potential sales and strategic reviews before formal announcements. Notable coverage includes Sazerac’s acquisition of Au Vodka, Blackstone’s exploration of a ZO Skin Health sale, CVC’s efforts to sell the parent of Dr Teal’s, and Colgate-Palmolive’s planned divestitures. She also covers consumer IPOs, including Jersey Mike’s and Black Rock Coffee, and co-writes Wall Street market reports. She joined Reuters in 2022 after three years covering leveraged finance and primary debt markets.
Adekunle Agbetiloye
Adekunle Agbetiloye is a senior reporter who connects capital flows, hard numbers and energy transition to the wider African economy. He works at Business Insider Africa, covering how money, technology and energy reshape economic growth, jobs and living conditions. His beat spans the African economy, technology, energy transition, climate change, startups and critical minerals, with a focus on concrete deals and data-led stories. He reports on African startup funding cycles, sovereign wealth funds, billionaire investors, multilateral and private investment programs, energy and power markets, Bitcoin mining, and economic policy choices. His work follows how governments finance spending, manage debt and respond to social pressure, and how sector snapshots and health and development metrics reveal links between macro indicators, corporate strategy and everyday costs.
Aimee Picchi
Aimee Picchi connects Social Security, retirement programs and economic policy directly to the financial security of ordinary Americans, showing how macro decisions hit household budgets. She is associate managing editor for CBS MoneyWatch at CBS News, covering business and personal finance with clear, accessible explanations of complex money issues. Her core beat is Social Security and retirement, interest rates and inflation, and how policy, markets and company strategies affect workers, retirees, savers and investors. She reports on benefit adequacy, looming Social Security cuts, COLA changes, Federal Reserve rate decisions, fuel costs, trade tensions and labor’s share of income, always framing coverage around pocketbook impacts. Her background includes retirement reporting fellowships, prior staff reporting on technology, media and business, an Institutional Investor book on affluent investors, and freelance work for national outlets. She also writes science fiction and fantasy and is a Nebula Award finalist.
Alex Harring
Alex Harring turns fast-moving market, economic and corporate developments into clear pre-market briefings that show what will matter when U.S. trading opens. He is a markets and economics reporter for CNBC’s digital platforms and writes Morning Squawk, a flagship daily newsletter that gives readers five key things to know before the stock market opens. His beat spans financial markets, investing, consumer trends and the U.S. economy, with coverage of central bank decisions, inflation, corporate strategy, sector moves and geopolitical shocks. He focuses on how policy, data and earnings shape equities, interest rates, currencies and investor positioning, linking price action with underlying drivers in real time and in reported features. Harring’s background reporting on corporate news, business and the economy across print, digital, broadcast and streaming informs his habit of connecting markets, companies and geopolitics in one frame.