So, we announced our succession plan this morning.
My emails and DMs lit up immediately, with all sorts of questions, but mostly asking, “Are you retiring?!?”
No, but I’ll get to that shortly.
The reason we announced this: As a financial planning firm, I wanted all of our clients, partners, employees, and colleagues to see that we practice what we preach. If you want clients to take you seriously when you advise them to think in decades, make estate and business continuity plans, you have to follow your own advice.
From the beginning, when we self-funded our launch and had just five of us, we have been inviting key employees to become partners. We have always done this with our own capital, a bank line of credit, and no outside investors. By the end of our first decade, we had 20 partners. In 2024, there were 26 partners. This year, we grew to 29 partners.
Our goal is to be the best employee-owned advisory shop in the country.
As for my daily routine, nothing has changed. I still hold the roles of Chairman and Chief Investment Officer. My daily activities are essentially the same. I am still in the office the same number of times a week; I am still doing my pods at Bloomberg, still blogging, speaking at conferences, and writing more books.
What is going to change? More of our RWM rockstars are now employee-owners, with many more expected to become owners over the next decade.
Maybe I’ll swap the old Cabrio for a newer model, one with ABS & airbags. I recently found a new timepiece I’d been hunting for a while, and I pulled the trigger on that. And, I added more Munis to my personal portfolio. Aside from that, not much is different…
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For the past 12 years, we have built a firm dedicated to putting clients first. Every day, we share with investors what we truly believe are the best ways to manage their portfolios and financial lives. We do this for free to the general public, and in great specificity and detail for our clients. I have been doing this publicly since the late 1990s, and that will go on for as long as I can cobble together an intelligent sentence.
I am excited about what we are building, and look forward to what this team will accomplish over the next decade!
Source:
Ritholtz Wealth Management Executes Employee-led Succession Plan to Create Industry’s Most Visible, Dominant “Forever Firm”
BusinessWire, Jan 30, 2026
See also:
Inside Ritholtz Wealth Management’s Succession Plan
By Andrew Welsch
Barron’s Jan 30, 2026
Barry Ritholtz sells shares in $7.6bn RIA’s planned succession
By Ian Wenik
CityWire, Jan 30, 2026
Ritholtz Wealth Puts Succession Plan in Place As Co-Founder Barry Ritholtz Nears 65
By Alex Ortolani
Wealth Management, January 30, 2026
