About The Big Picture

Welcome to The Big Picture!

This site is written by and for investment professionals, as well as anyone else interested in investing, markets, and the economy. We key in on what you should — and more importantly, what you should not — do with your money. I have been writing about these topics for ~15 years, and blogging since 2003.

By sheer accident, it has become one of the best reviewed finance blogs on the web.

The writing is designed to be very accessible — no PHD required. Hell, no college degree is required. If I can make this stuff understandable to my right brain art teacher wife and my 74 year old retired real estate agent mom, than I can help you learn the basics of markets, investing and the economy.

Over the years,we have put up a fair bit of content:

Over 12,000 posts
250,000 comments
53 million page views

The readership of The Big Picture ranges form Mom & Pop, to Wall Street asset managers, economists, strategists, individual investors, print & tv & radio journalists, Professors, researchers, and analysts. Traffic logs show regular visitors come from the Federal Reserve, Goldman Sachs, the Joint Economic Committee of Congress, as well as  Dr. Wu’s statistic class at Sonoma State University.

Since its humble Typepad days, The Big Picture has evolved as a site. Here’s the overview:

Posts: The main column is where our prime market/economy/investing posts (mostly by Ritholtz) get published. This is the heart of the blog, but there is a lot more going on here.

Side Column: The right hand column is a blog staple — but we’ve tweaked this to make it a little more interesting. At the top is our Quote of the Day. I have collected 1000s of these over the years, and a different one apears each day. Any similarity to published content and the QOTD is strictly coincidental, as the Word Press quote plug in selects one randomly each day.

Blog within the blog: Below that you will find “Macro Notes” — these are real time economic data updates by Peter Boockvar. Pete is another Wall Street pro, and has a broad institutional audience of hedge funds and traders. He is a regular in the financial press. Throughout the day, Pete responds to the latest news releases with pithy commentary in real time. Pete’s contributions — think of it as a blog within a blog — are outstanding. You would do well to pay attention to his daily missives.

Recent Posts are posted by headline, as well as by topic.

In addition to what you see on the front page, there are 4 tabs.

Navigation:  Pretty straight forward stuff. Up top, you will see four tabs. They are labeled: Think Tank, Video, Book Club and Weekend (details below)

Search: Next to the tabs is a Google powered Search feature for the site (top right).

RSS, Email Subscription: Below the main header, you will find Subscribe via RSS button, and opposite that, a Subscribe by email box.

Admin info can be found in a series of links: *About,  *Contact,  *Managed Assets,  *Speaking,  *Disclosures.  Its all pretty standard stuff, and should provde you the answers to most of the great mysteries of the universe.

Tab Content:  The four tabs are designed for less timely or longer form content:

Think Tank: Contains writings by a fantastic group of Economists, Strategists, Technicians and Market watchers, plus the archive of the Macro Notes. (Bios of Think Tank authors are here).  As you can see, these are a top notch group of pros, who can be counted on for thoughtful and provocative weekly or monthly commentary.

Video: All of the flash video that loads so terribly slow is also behind a separate tab to speed up load times on the main page

Book Shelf:  All of the discussions and reviews of various books can be found here.

Weekend: Are a fairly random collection of interesting graphics, consumer goods, music and film related items. If I find something unrelated to the markets that is nonetheless interesting or compelling, it goes here. (More on these later).

Lastly, you can find more info on the people behind TBP through these links:

-For more on Barry Ritholtz, click here.

-Bios of all the Think Tank Authors are here.