The market can move for irrational reasons, and you have to be prepared for that, ... you need to make big bets when the odds are in your favor -- not big enough to ruin you, but big enough to make a difference.

Do you really like a particular stock? Put 10% or so of your portfolio on it. Make the idea count … Good [investment] ideas should not be diversified away into meaningless oblivion.

Bond investors want growth much like equity investors, and to the extent that too much austerity leads to recession or stagnation then credit spreads widen out - even if a country can print its own currency and write its own cheques.

Accountants, machinists, medical technicians, even software writers that write the software for "machines" are being displaced without upscaled replacement jobs. Retrain, rehire into higher paying and value-added jobs? That may be the political myth of the modern era. There aren't enough of those jobs.

Companies typically borrow money at less than their return on equity and therefore compound their return at the expense of lenders.

Imperceptibly, the developed world's manufacturing base was gradually eroding and being replaced by securitized finance that destroyed itself and nearly its economies in 2008.

In questioning initially whether I am a great investor, I open the door to question whether other similarly esteemed public icons like Bill Miller are as well. It seems, perhaps, that the longer and longer you keep at it in this business the more and more time you have to expose your Achilles heel - wherever and whatever that might be.