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Risk and Reward: How to Handle Market Volatility and Build Long-Term Wealth
"One of the greatest financial writers of this era" –Downtown Josh Brown, star of CNBC's The Halftime Report, co-founder and CEO of Ritholtz Wealth Management
***********
Let me tell you the secret to investing. There is no secret...
When investing your hard-earned money, risk and reward are attached at the hip. There are no shortcuts. Getting rich overnight is a pipe dream.
Author, podcast host, and Director of Institutional Asset Management at Ritholtz Wealth Management Ben Carlson CFA, offers a modern guide to surviving and thriving in the markets by taking a wrecking ball to his own investment philosophy to truly examine the good, the bad and the ugly.
Carlson contextualises the biggest risks of long-term investing by analysing key moments in global financial history. He examines everything from the Great Depression and its aftermath in the 1930s to the Japanese financial bubble of the 1980s, to the bursting of the dot-com bubble in the 2000s, and considers what modern investors can learn from these events to apply to their future trading strategies.
Part practical manual, part economic history, Risk & Reward will give you a better grasp of the biggest risks in investing and teach you how to protect yourself against them so you can survive the short-term, and thrive in the long-term.
Whether you’re a first-time saver or a lifelong investor, this book will change how you see risk – not as something to fear, but as the very reason reward exists.
***********
"If you want to get better at managing your money, Risk & Reward is a must-read" –Nick Maggiulli, author, Just Keep Buying
***********
Let me tell you the secret to investing. There is no secret...
When investing your hard-earned money, risk and reward are attached at the hip. There are no shortcuts. Getting rich overnight is a pipe dream.
Author, podcast host, and Director of Institutional Asset Management at Ritholtz Wealth Management Ben Carlson CFA, offers a modern guide to surviving and thriving in the markets by taking a wrecking ball to his own investment philosophy to truly examine the good, the bad and the ugly.
Carlson contextualises the biggest risks of long-term investing by analysing key moments in global financial history. He examines everything from the Great Depression and its aftermath in the 1930s to the Japanese financial bubble of the 1980s, to the bursting of the dot-com bubble in the 2000s, and considers what modern investors can learn from these events to apply to their future trading strategies.
Part practical manual, part economic history, Risk & Reward will give you a better grasp of the biggest risks in investing and teach you how to protect yourself against them so you can survive the short-term, and thrive in the long-term.
Whether you’re a first-time saver or a lifelong investor, this book will change how you see risk – not as something to fear, but as the very reason reward exists.
***********
"If you want to get better at managing your money, Risk & Reward is a must-read" –Nick Maggiulli, author, Just Keep Buying
220 pages, Paperback
First published May 12, 2026
About the author
Ben Carlson
10 books67 followersBen Carson is the Director of Institutional Asset Management at Ritholtz Wealth Management. The firm creates detailed investment plans and manage portfolios for institutions and individuals to help them achieve their goals.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 32 reviews
May 26, 2026
If you are already familiar with the Boglehead investing philosophy or have read the classic index-investing literature from a decade ago, there is absolutely nothing new here. Risk and Reward is essentially a rehash and summarization of concepts the Boglehead community has espoused for years. On the positive side, it serves as a very nice, clean refresher and a solid reminder of core principles, but it doesn't go beyond that.
June 10, 2026
One of the best measure of a “good” book is how many people you will gift this book to. I will likely gift this book to anyone interested in learning the basics of saving/investing/saving for retirement.
June 5, 2026
Ben delivered!
Having leanrt so much from Ben, Josh, Michael, and Barry through reading, listening, watching their content, I was skeptical of this book - thinking it would just be a mash-up of his blogs.
Nope! It was a very well written, well constructed, full of great ideas book that both a finance layperson and a finance professional like me would benefit immensely from.
I think my go-to recommendations for new investors are now going to be a pair recommendation: Risk & Reward, and Just Keep Buying.
Having leanrt so much from Ben, Josh, Michael, and Barry through reading, listening, watching their content, I was skeptical of this book - thinking it would just be a mash-up of his blogs.
Nope! It was a very well written, well constructed, full of great ideas book that both a finance layperson and a finance professional like me would benefit immensely from.
I think my go-to recommendations for new investors are now going to be a pair recommendation: Risk & Reward, and Just Keep Buying.
August 16, 2026
Risk and Reward is a great introductory text for those seeking to invest for the long term. For those already convinced in index fund investing, you won't find anything new here.
October 22, 2026
Ben Carlson’s “Risk and Reward” is a financial fire drill for people who mistake a rising brokerage balance for a durable investment philosophy. Its proposition is unfashionable: wealth requires accepting uncertainty, and the investor most likely to derail your future is the one brushing your teeth. Carlson approaches markets less like a fortune teller than an accident investigator. The Great Depression, Japan’s bubble, and financial upheavals become case studies in the distance between knowing history and surviving its next improvisation. Crucially, Japan complicates the American assumption that patience always produces a timely rescue. That willingness to interrogate his own convictions gives the book ballast. The result sits somewhere between a behavioral finance primer, a pocket economic history, and a Stoic’s field manual. Diversification becomes humility expressed through asset allocation; compounding rewards endurance rather than clairvoyance. Carlson’s central distinction is between avoiding discomfort and managing danger. These are not interchangeable ambitions, however insistently financial television treats them as such. There is something punk about this refusal to entertain. Against an industry selling urgency, Carlson offers discipline. Against the dopamine carnival of market predictions, he proposes a portfolio you can live with. The relevant question is not whether a strategy looks brilliant on a spreadsheet, but whether its owner will abandon it when the headlines turn apocalyptic. Still, readers already fluent in diversification and behavioral pitfalls may find familiar furniture rearranged rather than a new house built. The historical framework promises more than a technical investing toolkit: this is not a guide to valuation, security selection, or sophisticated portfolio engineering. Its strength is perspective, with the corresponding limitation that perspective cannot make uncertainty disappear. Yet originality is overrated when the challenge is remembering sound principles under pressure. Carlson’s achievement is to make sensible investing feel neither effortless nor heroic. “Risk and Reward” offers something more useful than a market forecast: an argument for becoming the sort of investor who can survive being wrong, remain invested, and let time do its unglamorous work.
September 2, 2026
Decent book that lays out some foundational investing principles and explains them well. Nothing too groundbreaking and I didn't disagree with much in here. However I have some issues:
1. All these personal finance books feel the need to start each chapter with different cute little anecdote and then tie it back to finance. I get the appeal, but it feels formulaic and repetitive to me
2. In Chapter 8, the cute anecdote is the Apollo program. The author's point is that the Apollo spacecraft was extremely complex, and was bound to experience a failure such as the Apollo 13 incident. Similarly, the economy and markets are extremely complex and you should expect occasional failures and crises. Fine, but unfortunately the author and fact-checker were asleep at the wheel and I feel I must set the record straight.
- P79: "When President John F. Kennedy declared in 1961 that the United States would put a man on the moon, it was a pipe dream. The government had no rockets, launchpads, spacesuits, computers or knowledge about what it would take to land on the moon." False. The Mercury program was already underway and just a few weeks before JFK's speech, Al Shephard had already gone to space (on top of a rocket, from a launchpad, wearing a spacesuit, with the help of computers). Granted, they needed massive improvements in all those components to actually get to the moon, but it's not like they didn't have any.
- p80: "There were 14 manned Apollo missions in total" False. There were 12 manned Apollo missions (including Apollo 1).
- p80, discussing Apollo 13: "Halfway to the moon, an oxygen tank exploded" They were ~200k miles away from earth, ~80% of the way to the moon. I guess halfway could be just an approximation but it's pretty different. The Jack Swigert statue plaque at the Denver airport also gets this wrong; why can no one get it right!
Anyway it was nice to have some Apollo history in the book but would have been better to be more accurate.
1. All these personal finance books feel the need to start each chapter with different cute little anecdote and then tie it back to finance. I get the appeal, but it feels formulaic and repetitive to me
2. In Chapter 8, the cute anecdote is the Apollo program. The author's point is that the Apollo spacecraft was extremely complex, and was bound to experience a failure such as the Apollo 13 incident. Similarly, the economy and markets are extremely complex and you should expect occasional failures and crises. Fine, but unfortunately the author and fact-checker were asleep at the wheel and I feel I must set the record straight.
- P79: "When President John F. Kennedy declared in 1961 that the United States would put a man on the moon, it was a pipe dream. The government had no rockets, launchpads, spacesuits, computers or knowledge about what it would take to land on the moon." False. The Mercury program was already underway and just a few weeks before JFK's speech, Al Shephard had already gone to space (on top of a rocket, from a launchpad, wearing a spacesuit, with the help of computers). Granted, they needed massive improvements in all those components to actually get to the moon, but it's not like they didn't have any.
- p80: "There were 14 manned Apollo missions in total" False. There were 12 manned Apollo missions (including Apollo 1).
- p80, discussing Apollo 13: "Halfway to the moon, an oxygen tank exploded" They were ~200k miles away from earth, ~80% of the way to the moon. I guess halfway could be just an approximation but it's pretty different. The Jack Swigert statue plaque at the Denver airport also gets this wrong; why can no one get it right!
Anyway it was nice to have some Apollo history in the book but would have been better to be more accurate.
May 21, 2026
Ben Carlson has written the rare investing book that is both intellectually honest and genuinely encouraging. A combination harder to pull off than it sounds.
A word on fit before you dive in: readers who already have a basic grasp of financial planning and investing mechanics will get the most out of this book. Carlson isn't teaching you what a mutual fund is; he's teaching you how to think once you've moved beyond 'should I invest?' to 'how do I not wreck this?' That distinction matters.
Risk & Reward doesn't pretend to hand you a formula for beating the market. Instead, it makes a compelling case for something more valuable: the mental framework to survive markets long enough to let compounding do its work. Carlson's deadpan wisdom cuts through the noise early. "Buy and hold is the worst form of investing, except for all the other investment strategies that have been tried from time to time," and he never really lets up.
What sets this book apart is its unflinching honesty about behavioral risk. Loss aversion, the urge to react, the seductive appeal of concentrated bets, Carlson names them all and explains why they are the real enemies of wealth. His observation that "you can't put a price on the ability to ignore what others around you are doing with their money" gets to the heart of the book.
A useful analogy occurred to me while reading: think of the slogan for the TV show, Survivor: Outwit, Outplay, Outlast. Carlson makes a persuasive case that individual investors can't reasonably expect to outwit or outplay the market. But with discipline and a long horizon? You can absolutely outlast. The epilogue's 20 investing beliefs are a crisp, keep-it-forever summary.
If you're serious about building and protecting your wealth, this book belongs in your library.
A word on fit before you dive in: readers who already have a basic grasp of financial planning and investing mechanics will get the most out of this book. Carlson isn't teaching you what a mutual fund is; he's teaching you how to think once you've moved beyond 'should I invest?' to 'how do I not wreck this?' That distinction matters.
Risk & Reward doesn't pretend to hand you a formula for beating the market. Instead, it makes a compelling case for something more valuable: the mental framework to survive markets long enough to let compounding do its work. Carlson's deadpan wisdom cuts through the noise early. "Buy and hold is the worst form of investing, except for all the other investment strategies that have been tried from time to time," and he never really lets up.
What sets this book apart is its unflinching honesty about behavioral risk. Loss aversion, the urge to react, the seductive appeal of concentrated bets, Carlson names them all and explains why they are the real enemies of wealth. His observation that "you can't put a price on the ability to ignore what others around you are doing with their money" gets to the heart of the book.
A useful analogy occurred to me while reading: think of the slogan for the TV show, Survivor: Outwit, Outplay, Outlast. Carlson makes a persuasive case that individual investors can't reasonably expect to outwit or outplay the market. But with discipline and a long horizon? You can absolutely outlast. The epilogue's 20 investing beliefs are a crisp, keep-it-forever summary.
If you're serious about building and protecting your wealth, this book belongs in your library.
July 8, 2026
Travels well trod ground so there is nothing new here. This was a perfectly fine introductory or overview of the last 20 years of personal finance information that is very numbers focused (ie repeating countless ways of measuring various stock markets performance over x years) so I didn’t find it particularly novel. That said, I still (half) listened to it all as I think this stuff needs to be drilled into you so you have the right responses during the ups and downs of the market (diversify, buy and hold, don’t panic, keep fees low). As the late John Bogle would say, “don’t just do something, stand there!”
August 14, 2026
The closing chapters and epilogue offer sound advice. I get that all of the preceding chapters were leading up to that… but it’s definitely not a first financial book for someone. What I mean is… so much is devoted to all the possible scenarios of risk that I was like, “I get it. This is a longterm commitment. Diversification is key. Rewarding will happen, but risk (volatility) is part of the process.” That said, I did nerd out on everything he included about the stock market! Sooooo much information! It’s worth one’s time to really understand emotions and investing as well as how to seriously counteract impulse financial decisions.
June 28, 2026
I’m a Big Ben Carlson fan, both written and spoken word ( via his podcasts). This book was as advertised— a very enjoyable and quick read that does a great job concisely covering the last 100+ years of the market to give a solid context and reinforcement to the wisdom of diversification and Bogle-esque investing. Ben makes sometime dense data easily digestible. Sometimes too high a level for my tastes, but I think that was intentional to make this more of an Everyman read. I will share this as readily as I recommend Morgan H.
Nicely done Ben!!
Nicely done Ben!!
June 3, 2026
I just like the calm steady demeanor and approach of Ben.
This is the same reason why I tune in weekly to Animal Spirits and Ask the Compound - just like working out and fitness, your financial mental resiliency is a muscle that needs to be honed in good times and bad.
There is no real new content, but rather distills his investing philosophy and demeanor in an enjoyable and easy to consume way.
This is the same reason why I tune in weekly to Animal Spirits and Ask the Compound - just like working out and fitness, your financial mental resiliency is a muscle that needs to be honed in good times and bad.
There is no real new content, but rather distills his investing philosophy and demeanor in an enjoyable and easy to consume way.
June 14, 2026
I debated rating the book three or four stars and ultimately chose four. Ben Carlson provides a wealth of practical information, and I appreciate his concise writing style. I especially liked the chapter on Japan’s stock market experience. Still, personal finance is complex, so readers should be careful about following the book’s advice without further research. Even with that word of caution, I recommend this book.
September 23, 2026
Solid but pretty repetitive. Good for novice investors but it is very much trying to just drill one point into you. It’s a very significant point yes but overall think other books are more insightful. ‘The psychology of money’ or ‘Mastering the market cycle’ are better books imo. Still worth your time not a long book especially as a beginner but personally I was hoping it would be more technical.
May 22, 2026
Ben Carlson is one of the great financial writers of our time. I would put him right alongside Morgan Housel. Balancing risk is not overlooked in this book. He masterfully connects historical context to practical modern insight. There is no formula but there is patience and consistency. I’d recommend this book to anyone who is serious about investing.
May 25, 2026
I just loved this book! I read it all in 2 days during a rainy vacation and it was so interesting, I wish I had more to read. I wasn’t sure what to anticipate because I bought it right away before I heard many reviews but it was a great mix of charts and stories and history. Such a unique way to present the history of investing, the markets and how people react. Great book!
June 14, 2026
This is a great supplement book to Morgan Housel’s Same as Ever. Great investing book and one of my all time favorites. I love how is simplifies investing and details the importance of diversification backed by research along with events that have happened and will continue to happen. I wish my younger self read this in my first year of starting to invest.
August 28, 2026
This is just okay from Carlson. It feels more like a book of blog posts than a cohesive group of ideas around a common topic. It is disjointed and repetitive for the majority of the book.
That being said, there is still good investment stuff in here for new investors. Nothing groundbreaking, but for those early to investing it is worthwhile.
That being said, there is still good investment stuff in here for new investors. Nothing groundbreaking, but for those early to investing it is worthwhile.
July 11, 2026
Keep investing. That is the idea.
It's a good psychology book. I think maybe a lot of people may feel this book is too plain, but this is what's needed during the investment journey. Staying patience, ignoring the noise. Thats a very hard thing to do.
It's a good psychology book. I think maybe a lot of people may feel this book is too plain, but this is what's needed during the investment journey. Staying patience, ignoring the noise. Thats a very hard thing to do.
July 22, 2026
8/10. Simple and concise book covering long-term investing principles, volatility, bull and bear markets, inflation, fear & greed, etc. Learned about the Japanese bubble being by far the biggest in history. Easy read, nothing revelatory
September 5, 2026
I learned much of what was in this book years ago, but still a great read. It has lots of great examples and solid evidence for why steady, long term investing in the market is still the best way to reach your retirement financial goals.
October 18, 2026
The book contains details historical analysis, but the conclusion is basically the same (e.g., keep invest long-term in index funds). If you have been reading financial advice books, this book doesn't really teach you anything new.
May 28, 2026
Nothing new here. Just a lot about the past and how risk and reward go together over long and short periods of time. Good graphs. Good author but probably a book not needed to be written.
June 4, 2026
Great read!!
June 14, 2026
Nothing groundbreaking, just good advice (and arguments to support that) for long term diversified investing
June 21, 2026
Last few chapters were the best part, so glad I kept at it.
June 21, 2026
One of the best financial books out there!
June 27, 2026
Decent read that confirms much of my own investing philosophy.
June 29, 2026
Book 13 of 2026: "Have you ever noticed that anybody driving slower than you is an idiot, and anyone going faster than you is a maniac?" You have to figure out the right speed for your investments.
July 19, 2026
A bit too lengthy, but full of interesting facts and stories, so entertaining. Audible audio book would have been better with a professional speaker instead the authors.
August 16, 2026
Love Ben Carlson pods, didn’t love this book
Displaying 1 - 30 of 32 reviews