Barry Ritholtz, Columnist

A Billionaire Makes a Classic Investing Error

Concentrating in a single asset class can be an invitation to trouble.

May 3, 2018 at 4:40 PM UTC

Barry Ritholtz is a former Bloomberg Opinion columnist. He is chairman and chief investment officer of Ritholtz Wealth Management, and was previously chief market strategist at Maxim Group. He is the author of “Bailout Nation.”

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I try to avoid giving unsolicited advice to billionaires. They are doing just fine without me. Besides, nobody likes to hear from the cheap seats, especially when they just made a terrible, horrible, reckless investing error that poses unnecessary risk and could cost quite literally billions of dollars.

I bring this up after I read the headline “This Billionaire Has Put Half His Net Worth Into Gold” on Bloomberg News, and the story that went with it. It describes a very concentrated investing bet: