Never forget this simple truism: Forecasting is marketing, plain and simple.

For those of you who may be unaware, [Michael] Boskin is the economist/weasel/fraud who helped to officially distort the CPI, making it more or less worthless as a measure of inflation. The Boskin Commission... was an act of cowardice. Rather than man up and say fix this, its broken, we can't afford it.

You can blow on the dice all you want, but whether they come up seven is still a function of random luck.

Rather than engage in the sort of selective retention that so many investors tend to do and pretend mistakes never happened, I prefer to own them. This allows me to learn from them and, with any luck, avoid making the same errors again.

Unlike cheap stocks, inexpensive asset classes have a lower chance of big drawdowns (broad asset classes don't go to zero) and a higher probability of average or better returns.

This ugly duckling investment will likely need time - quarters, or even years - to blossom into a beautiful swan.

The market is going to love it. The market always seems to applaud major mergers, even though the vast majority of them don't work out and don't increase shareholder value.