Podcast Episode - The Number One Piece of Advice for Investors Today

Did last week’s stock market sell off scare you?  On this Suze School episode, Suze and Keith Fitz-Gerald get to the bottom of what happened and tell you what you need to know, right now.

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Podcast Transcript:

Robert: Hi there, it's Robert, the producer. Make sure you listen all the way to the end of this brand new episode of the Women and Money podcast because we have a special treat for you.

Suze: November 16, 2025. Welcome everybody to the Women and Money podcast, as well as everybody smart enough to listen. And yes, today is Suze School. Now listen to me closely. There are so many things that we need to learn because how was your week last week? What did the market do to you?

Did your positions make you go absolutely nuts and were you scared because they went down a week or so ago and then they went up and then went what's going on here? So once again, because last week, Suze School was absolutely such a tremendous success in explaining to you what's really going on because it's so much different than all of you think, guess who's back today? Yes, the one and only, as I call him, Fitzy. Fritzy, I have many names for him, but Mister Keith Fitz-Gerald and all of you now know who he is. And if you don't, do me a favor, just look him up, and you'll understand why he is really the only one that I go to when I want you to know and I want to know for sure what the heck is going on. So Keith, seriously, everything got hit. So now explain to everybody what's really going on and why this is an opportunity of a lifetime if they could just understand that.

Keith: I would be delighted because what makes this week different from last week, Suze, is last week the nonsense and the shenaniganry was largely confined to two or three stocks. It was Nvidia and Palantir right at the top of the list because that's what Mr. Burry "Predictimus Maximus" decided to, you know, file on.

Uh, in addition to all his other holdings, but what makes this week different is that when he did that, it was like throwing a rock in the pond. Suddenly you have ripples, and all of the pension funds, endowments, large funds, index funds, mutual funds, ETFs, they all picked up on that. And so this week what happened was that selling got the computers going and once the computers got into it, Suze, all the other computers that pick up, it's like it's a game of Chinese whispers if you remember that in kindergarten, you know, one person says something at the one end of the room and you try to whisper it all the way to the other and the story never arrives in the same way it was sort of originated.

Suze: Keith, I think it's called telephone, you know, telephone.

Keith: That one, yes...

Suze: I was like, what the heck is he talking about? Oh, OK, go on.

Keith: Well, anyway, you know, the, the thing about this is that now suddenly all of the computers have the incentive to begin selling and unwinding because they determine that there's the probability of a disturbance. The big institutions often invest because of flow, and what I mean by that is that if money is coming in, they buy. If money is going out, they sell. And so when Mr. Burry threw a rock in the water, he ignited a flow battle. A lot of funds that I want out. A lot of funds that I want in, and volatility shows up and more sellers than buyers appeared at the table. And so we saw this big massive selloff because nobody wanted to be the last person at the party and that's really when you break it all the way down as simple as it gets.

Suze: Let's really now get to the question, which is.

When somebody sells a stock, somebody has to buy that stock.

So therefore, who is buying what we are selling right now? And when I say we, it's usually everyday people. They've gotten scared. They are out. They already have a profit because really they have listened to us, Keith, and they bought Palantir, they bought Nvidia, they bought all these stocks, and they're still up. It's not like they've lost money. It's just that they've lost profit.

And so then what comes is that, oh my God, I don't want to lose any more money. I'm getting out. That's it. I've had it. Is it what some people want them to do at this point? Who is buying what they are selling?

Keith: That is literally a trillion dollar question because people tend to look at the headlines and all the red on the screen, Suze, they think, oh my goodness, I better sell. Oh no, I can't be the last one at the party. Oh no, I got to turn out the lights.

But the reality is you can't just sell into a vacuum, right? You can't play catch with somebody who isn't there. And what's happening is every individual who gets scared and sells, there's an institution or another investor buying their shares. So really the way to think about you last week and why it's such an opportunity is that all of that selling meant that somebody else was buying and they were buying a lot. So, bottom line on that one is the deeper and steeper the sell off, the more opportunity there is on the other side for investors who understand that for every seller there is a buyer because that's the side of the equation you want to be on is the buying, not the selling.

Suze: And so here you are and you have a stock.

You've made a lot of money on it, meaning, and you know what the truth is, you don't make money, people, until you do sell.

You have something known as a free trade. You buy a stock and it's doubled. Once it's doubled, once you're up 100% on your money, you usually say what, Keith?

Keith: I usually say sell half of it. And the reason I say sell half of it is, number one, if you do that, you pay for your original investment.

And number two, now you are free to let at least that initial investment ride till the end of time for free with no worries about whether it goes to zero or whether it goes to a hundred gazillion dollars. The point is you now own it for free. It makes you the house in Vegas, not the patsy at the table.

Suze: And what's the hardest for people to do about that is that, and we'll take Palantir for example, it went from seven, went to 14, went to 28, when it kept doubling all the way up. And would you have suggested to those people to keep doing one free trade after another free trade, or would it have been better for them to just keep it and have all of those shares and now they would have really made a whole lot of money because I think what's hard for people to get is.

Oh my God, I sold half. All right, now I'm playing with the house money. But if I had just kept it all in there, this is how much money I would have. What would you say to them?

Keith: I would say the same thing I say every time. That's your greed gland working overtime and you need to get that out of the equation. Keep your emotions off the table. And the reason is that studies, my research and others show that when you use a tactic like this and you are periodically selling into strength and then when it drops buying more and selling into strength and buying more, you're actually more tax efficient in many cases, but more importantly, you wind up with more shares than you would have otherwise if you just stayed true to it from the very beginning. Now dividends can change that a little bit over time, but with a company like Palantir that doesn't pay any, what it shows is that volatility you fear is actually an advantage. Somebody's opening the door every time there's a pullback for you to accumulate more shares.

And the other thing that people always say about the free trade to me is like, well, I could have done this and I could have done that. Yes, you could have, but I would probably rather have the profits in my pocket and the freedom to pursue more shares if I wanted to have a lunch, take my wife to a nice date, do whatever it is I want with the winnings, preferably in my case, reinvest because I, you know, that's what I like to do.

Suze: But reinvest not necessarily in Palanter but possibly in something else as well.

Keith: That's the other beauty of the free trade is you don't have to go right back in the same stock you just took the free trade on. In fact, many times what I will suggest to investors around the world is if you have a really hot runner like Palantir, take your free trade and then put it into something that hasn't run so much that produces great income or something you've wanted to buy but you haven't yet seen a pullback on or you know there's all kinds of things you can do with that money, but now you have the freedom to do it and that's the part people miss.

Suze: So what I'm trying to say to all of you that are listening right now is that when it comes to investing, I want all of you to stop looking at look what my portfolio is up today. Oh my God, I'm up x percent on this. Look at this. Oh my God. Oh my God. And you get so involved in how much money you've made. But again, you don't make it till you sell, that you forget to look at your portfolio and go, do I have too much in one area? Am I too much just in AI because I obviously, Keith, as you know, have an extensive portfolio of far more than just artificial intelligence, and while those stocks were going down, my other stocks were going up, and the truth of the matter is my portfolio didn't lose money overall. What would you tell people to do as a perfect portfolio right now if you were going to instruct them?

Keith: Well, to borrow a term from your own experience and your legacy, you need to construct the must-have portfolio, right? Now, the must-have portfolio is not about the hot stocks, contrary to what people think, and I get asked this all over the world by folks who are investing. Hey, Keith, what's the next hot stock? Wrong question.

The number one piece of advice to investors listening today is you need to forget about the hot stocks. What you need to focus on is the stocks that are going to be there in 10, 20, 30 years when you need them, when your family needs them, when your grandchildren, your unborn great, great grandchildren need them, because the longevity is what really creates the value. Now again, you're gonna be buying and selling, it's going to be volatile going back and forth all the way between here and then.

But when you get right down to it, the list of companies that is really changing our world is actually very, very short, and you don't want to be playing with stocks that are just a better mousetrap. You want to be investing in stocks and they can be utilities, they can be stores they can be athletic manufacturers, whatever the company is it doesn't have to be AI because it can be another company that is changing the world in a way that is not yet picked up on the media or recognized by the headlines. So you've got to concentrate and you've got to play to win because the other mistake that people make just since time began, is they fear losses more than they like winning.

And what I mean by that is they would rather say, oh I avoided that loss, but the problem is they worry about things that they can't control. If you flip that around, which is what I've encouraged investors to do for 45 years now, you play to win. Which companies are gonna be there? Which companies are gonna help me achieve my objectives and be there when I need them? And my objectives can be growth, they can be income, they can be exposure, they can be any number of things. But the important thing is I'm constantly maneuvering to win.

I'm not worried about not losing because I don't like to worry about things I can't control. I do like to worry about buying great stocks, at what price I can do it, what tactics do I use that can increase my future, and that's really the message.

Suze: And when you say your future.

The truth of the matter is it's everybody's future because our job, the two of us, is to bring this information to everyday investors, moms, pops, kids, whatever, so that they, number one, get educated, they understand it, but they know what to do. When do people sell?

When would you just say, I'm out, get out. Like, is there advice to keep people from freaking out and selling a good stock, and yet they keep their bad stock because their bad stock probably isn't doing anything? What advice would you give them at this point in time?

Keith: We have one golden rule, and it's something I learned from my mentors decades ago. There is only one rule that applies. If you buy a great company because it's great and you can identify all the reasons that it's great, the question you wanna ask yourself on a big down day is, OK, do all the reasons for which I bought this particular company still exist?

If the answer is yes, you grit your teeth, hold your breath, go for a walk, whatever it is, but you hold on because you know that the reasons you bought the company are still there. If a company does not any longer embody what it is you bought it for or the reasons for which you bought it, then boom, gone. Don't let the door hit you in the rear end on the way out. Don't ever look back. So for example,

Apple has had its share of trials and tribulations in recent years. People have said, Oh, innovation is dead. Tim Cook doesn't know what he's doing. They're not in AI. They're falling behind. None of those things is true, but that's what people think. So my argument with Apple is if Apple suddenly turned around and decided it was shifting 100% of its production capacity to making swimming pools,

I'd be gone like a shot because that's outside their primary expertise. It's outside their primary vision. It does not align with the reasons for which I bought Apple originally and encourage investors to continue to buy Apple today. So, you know, if we look at Peloton, for example, people flip that around and say, oh, this is this great innovative company, and I said, no, an iPad on a bike is not a functional business, you know, just ask the folks at GoPro who lost 98% of their money, and today Peloton continues to struggle. So this is a question of I wouldn't even buy it in the first place because it doesn't fit the fundamental reasons for which I thought it might be a great company. So that's really what you want to hone in on.

Suze: What would you tell people who are just starting now or want to invest? They want to be part of this. What would you tell them?

Keith: Number one, excellent, great, because the mindset, the decision to invest is one of the hardest decisions you will ever make in your life. So number one, absolute golf clap, applause, fabulous, well done. Second, invest consistently because what people get so drawn up about it, particularly in today's markets with smartphones and the internet and relentless, relentless news cycle that really is filled with most of nothing every 24 hours.

You know, consider it your job to do it consistently because the volatility that you fear is an opening for the reasons that we discussed. So if you're doing this consistently, your returns will be more consistent than they would if you just...

Suze: But that's what dollar cost averaging that people know they have to do that. Well, I'm putting you right on the spot, boyfriend. Would you do individual stocks or if you could only do one at a time.

And only maybe do one every four months, or would you do, just start with, just to see what it was like, dollar cost averaging into an ETF and if you did, what ETF would it be?

Keith: What I would do is I would put money into an ETF. If you've got a couple thousand dollars you need to get exposure to the markets. You need to start to be in to win. And you know a broad market ETF is probably as good as any, you know, a VOO or an S&P 500, something that taps you into technology in the future and the future profitability, but

I would also argue that you want to begin accumulating shares of the great names of our day: the Apples, the Microsoft, the Palantir, because getting those shares, even one at a time is gonna force you to pay attention.

But it's also going to help you build your future. If you hold even a single share of a company like Nvidia in 2011, you know, that could materially change your life today, your grandchildren's lives today. So you need to begin thinking about that. So my advice is you start, if you've got a couple thousand bucks, you start with a simple ETF. You begin adding shares of single companies if and when you can.

But let me clear something up about this idea of small companies. That's a myth. It used to be great. You go for the small stocks and oh boy, this is great because you're gonna hit a home run, but the reality of today's markets is very different than it was 10, 20, 30, 40 years ago. Small cap stocks very rarely make it. Palantir is an exception. It was 7 bucks once when I started talking to you about it. Now we're pushing back towards 200.

But that is rarer than hen's teeth. What you normally want to do is stick with the great big companies and you can buy fractional shares. You have many brokerages, you can buy a piece of something and still get dividends and still get appreciation, so the math still works. Now, that did not exist 30 years ago when I was starting to do the same thing or 40 years ago.

Keith: But it does...

Suze: I was right there with you, sweetheart.

Keith: It does today, right? And imagine how different, how much flexibility. It's really where I would want to wind up because

The opportunity in today's markets is vastly more significant than it was in our time because you can do all of these things with fractional shares. We've got the greatest concentration of computing power in human history. We have more medical capacity than we've ever seen. We're going to solve things like money and cancer and hunger in the next 10, 20 years, and all of those investments are happening now.

Suze: So one last, one more question for you.

So you buy like one share of a Costco, OK, 900 some odd dollars, or let's say you have $2,000 to invest and you can do fractional shares. Are you better off than buying like two shares of a Costco or taking that $2,000 and buying a fractional share of Nvidia, Costco, Apple, whatever, and divide that amount of money among maybe five shares than owning one full share.

Keith: If you have the ability to do fractional shares, I would submit you're better off buying a little bit of each of the big names. If you do not have the ability to do fractional shares at your brokers, then I would say you go one step at a time, one share at a time, but you start with a buy list and you just do it until that buy list is full,

Suze: But the truth of the matter is you probably shouldn't be dealing with a broker who doesn't do fractional shares.

Keith: There you go.

Suze: So everybody listen to what we just said to you, because I know a lot of you want to start and you're afraid to start, and I personally think your beginning block is always like for now anyway.

The ETF in VOO, then you have that covered. And then if you want to add a little bit more, like the... whatever it may be, whatever area you want to go into, and you only have a specific sum, do fractional shares of like five stocks of 10 stocks rather than just one share, one share of maybe two stocks, and that's all you have to invest.

So that's what I think. Yeah.

Keith: There's an interesting point here, right, that people don't really latch onto, you know, if you go to Vegas, the number of people who will let it all ride is disproportionately high, which is why Vegas is what it is. But as an investor, you don't have to play that game, and what people who are just starting out often don't understand.

Is that what Suze and I are talking about today, actually, the odds are in your corner this time because the big money, the money we're just talking about with Michael Burry and all the institutions, they have to keep their money moving 24/7, 365. You and I as individual investors can very deliberately pick the world's best companies and nothing else we can buy fractional shares at prices we stipulate. We don't have to react to all of this that they do. So when you're beginning, the hardest part about beginning is understanding that the control you have and your position as an individual investor is something Wall Street wishes it had, it's the greatest gift in the world to be able to play this game little at a time as your experience builds because the opportunity will always overwhelm and overcome the risks that you think you're facing but aren't really.

Suze: You know, though, we have to be careful though, Keith, when we use words, seriously, like game because this isn't a game, this is most people's life.

And most people, you know, are afraid of it because they think it's, it's like gambling, it's not for them or whatever, or they just don't know what to do, which is why I love when we can do these things because I always want everybody to get another opinion, and we have different opinions sometimes, but the main thing that we agree on,

is that you should only be dollar cost averaging. You should be diversified, meaning not all over the board, but possibly in VOO and even more AI stocks. You should be at a brokerage firm that only does fractional shares. You should have all your other things covered as well in terms of your retirement accounts and your estate plans. And what I truthfully think that makes the two of us so special.

Is that when you combine personal finance, the things you have to do behind the scenes, the mortgages and your wills and your trust with what are you investing in specifically and why, and you do all of that and you have two people like us that have now joined forces. I don't know. I think we're the best dynamic duo out there today. So I want... anything you want to say before we leave?

Keith: No, I'm completely humble that I agree with you absolutely 100%. It's one of the most exciting times in human history and not to invest is the mistake of your life. So I encourage everybody who's listening, give it a try. Come on in, the pool's not cold. You're gonna have a great time.

Suze: And you know, for those of you who are listening right now and you're in a 401k plan.

That's all, and hopefully it better be a Roth 401k. Do you hear me? Or a 403B or TSP. If you're not investing in Roth, if you're doing traditional retirement accounts, what you are making is the biggest mistake you could possibly make. However, the point that I'm about to make is this if you're investing in a 401k and that's what you're doing, you might want to think about opening up, if you qualify, a Roth IRA on the side.

And then employ some of these, you know, techniques that we've just talked to you about with the stocks that you've heard us mention. So, you should have more than just a retirement account at work and be limited to the mutual funds that they offer you. All right, boyfriend.

That's it for Suze School today and thank you so much. It was fun again, Fitzy. So everybody, until Thursday when Ms. Travis will join me on another Ask KT and Suze Anything. There's only one thing that I want you to remember when it comes to your money.

And that's this: people first. You have got to put yourself first in terms of you have to learn, you have to know what you need to do, you have to understand how to do these things. People first, then you'll know what to do with your money, and then you'll have the money to buy things. Stay safe, stay secure until next time, no, we love you. Bye bye.

Robert: Hang on, we're not done yet. It's Robert, the producer here. At the beginning of this episode, I promised you a special treat, and here it is. If you wanna watch Suze and Keith together because you've been asking to see them on YouTube together, make sure you go to Suze's YouTube channel at youtube.com/SuzeOrman and you can watch Suze and Keith in action.