Please stay tuned for important disclosure information at the conclusion of this episode.

Hi and welcome to the Longview. I'm Christine Ben's Director of Personal Finance and Retirement Planning for Morningstar.

On this week's episode, we'll feature some of our favorite clips from interviews we've done with financial planners,

advisors, and retirement researchers over the past year.

It's a counterpart to a previously released Best of episode that was all about investing.

As usual, we dealt into the topic of psychology and money and the importance of tuning out the noise

if you're a long-term investor.

Author J.L. Collins, who released a new edition of his blockbuster book, The Simple Path to Wealth,

Memorably Compared Investing in the Market to a Foamy Beer.

The market is really two things.

It's just like if you're looking at a mug of beer, it's two things.

So if you look at the mug of beer and let's assume it's in a mug that you can't see

through, right? There's going to be foam on top. And underneath that foam, there's going to be

beer. And depending how that beer was poured, there will be more or less foam, more or less

beer. And if you look at the stock market, there is the stock market of the financial

news that you see day to day, the traders, you know, all what's the market going to do next?

What stocks should you buy now? What should you be selling? All of that speculation, all

of that is what I call the foam. Underneath all the foam is the beer. And the beer is the actual

companies that we own, the actual companies that provide services and make products. and if they do that well, generate profits

that pay us as owners. It's the beer that I'm interested in. It's the beer that investors are

interested in because we're long term. We want to own that business or a small part of it. When I own VTSAX, I own a piece of

every publicly traded company in the United States of America. And everybody in those companies

...