When you're underperforming the index, you go home at night and cry in your beer. It's not fun, but who said this business should be fun. We're too well paid to hang our heads and say boo hoo.

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.

Slow growth and inflation have a tendency to accompany large deficits and increasing debt as a percentage of GDP.

Both from the standpoint of stocks and bonds, an investor wants to go where the growth is.

If companies don't know that they can run out of money, they won't be thinking of ways not to run out of money.

If financial assets no longer work for you at a rate far and above the rate of true wealth creation, then you must work longer for your money.

Be cautious and content with low positive returns in 2015. The time for risk taking has passed.