Research Library
Start Here.
Twelve ideas that anchor every piece of research published at Real Investment Advice. If you read these, the rest of the site makes sense.
After more than 30 years of writing about markets, I’ve come to believe a small set of ideas matters more than the rest. Not predictions. Not stock picks. The analytical foundations that everything else at RIA Advisors rests on.
This page collects the twelve I’d hand to anyone serious about understanding how we think. They’re grouped by topic. You don’t need to read them in order. But if you find yourself disagreeing with one of the macro pieces, the framing in the others will probably explain why.
The bottom line is this. Most financial-media narratives are built to sell fear and certainty. We’ve spent the last decade arguing, with data, that the more useful framework is humility about what markets reward and discipline about what they punish. These twelve pieces are the case for that view.
The Investing Framework
How we approach portfolio management, risk, and the rules that keep emotion out of the decision-making process.
01 / Cornerstone
The Definitive Guide to Managing Risk in Your Investment Portfolio
If you read only one piece on this list, read this one. Risk management is the single biggest determinant of whether a portfolio compounds over decades or unwinds in a single bear market. This is our complete framework for thinking about it.
02 / Cornerstone
The Rules Of Bob Farrell: An Updated Illustrated Guide
Bob Farrell spent 50 years at Merrill Lynch watching markets repeat themselves. His ten rules are the most useful market-psychology framework ever written. We’ve updated each one with current data and charts.
03 / Cornerstone
15 Investing Rules To Win The Long Game
The rules we actually run portfolios by. Cut losers short. Follow the trend. Emotionally driven decisions void the investment process. The full list, with the reasoning behind each one.
Cycles & Valuations
How to think about where we are in the market cycle and what valuations tell you about the next decade of returns.
04 / Cornerstone
Full Market Cycles: Half Bull and Half Bear
A complete market cycle is bull and bear together. Treating one half as the whole story is how investors end up giving back a decade of gains in 18 months. Here’s how the full cycle has played out across 150 years of market history.
05 / Cornerstone
The Best Measure Of Future Stock Market Returns
Valuations don’t time markets. But they do tell you, with surprising precision, what the next decade of returns will look like. The math is unforgiving, and it’s the math most investors most want to ignore.
The Macro Backbone
Four pieces that argue, with data, against the dominant financial-media narratives on the dollar, debt, money supply, and interest rates.
06 / Cornerstone
Rising Interest Rates: Why The Narrative Fails Against The Data
The “yields are detaching from fundamentals” thesis is everywhere. The data says otherwise. Seven decades of clean numbers show interest rates following growth and inflation, not deficits and supply panic.
07 / Cornerstone
The Debt And Deficit Problem Isn’t What You Think
The real debt problem isn’t the size. It’s the composition. Productive debt builds future capacity. Non-productive debt drags growth. The U.S. is now stuck in the second category, and that changes what the Fed can do about it.
08 / Cornerstone
Money Supply Growth: A Thesis With A Fatal Flaw
“M2 went parabolic, inflation is coming.” Except it didn’t, and it isn’t. The debasement thesis has a structural flaw most people pushing it don’t address. Here’s the flaw, and what M2 actually tells you.
09 / Cornerstone
The Dollar’s Plumbing: Conspiracy Vs. Data
Every few months, a headline declares the dollar’s reserve-currency reign is over. The TIC data tells a different story. Foreign Treasury holdings hit a record $9.4 trillion at the end of 2025. What looks like a Chinese conspiracy is actually Euroclear plumbing.
Psychology & Wealth Fundamentals
The behavioral traps that destroy returns, and the basic financial habits that build wealth in the first place.
10 / Cornerstone
Behavioral Traits That Are Killing Your Portfolio Returns
The biggest predictor of investor underperformance isn’t strategy. It’s psychology. Loss aversion, narrow framing, herding, anchoring, recency. These are the nine biases that explain why retail investors consistently buy high and sell low.
11 / Cornerstone
Money: The 10 Immutable Laws Of Building Wealth
Before the portfolio, the budget. Before the strategy, the savings rate. Most people aren’t failing at investing. They’re failing at the ten things you have to do first. None of them are complicated. All of them are hard.
Fixed Income
Why bonds still belong in portfolios, even when the loudest voices in financial media say otherwise.
12 / Cornerstone
Paul Tudor Jones: I Won’t Own Fixed Income
When Paul Tudor Jones says he won’t own bonds, it makes headlines. It also makes a useful test case. We walk through his thesis, then walk through the historical and structural data that argues the opposite. Bonds have a role. Here’s what it is.
What’s Next
Read the research. Then talk to us.
If anything in these twelve pieces raises a question about your own portfolio, that’s the point. We work with individuals, families, and business owners who want their investment strategy to look like the research we publish. The first conversation is free.