I think there's an awful lot of twaddle and bullshit on EVA. The whole game is to turn retained earnings into more earnings. EVA has ideas about cost of capital that make no sense. Of course, if a company generates high returns on capital and can maintain this over time, it will do well. But the mental system as a whole does not work.

A foreign correspondent, after talking to me for a while, once said: "You don't seem smart enough to be so good at what you're doing. Do you have an explanation?"

Expect hogs to eat a lot more in the presence of a lot of hog wash.

Litigation is notoriously time-consuming, inefficient, costly and unpredictable.

All the equity investors, in total, will surely bear a performance disadvantage per annum equal to the total croupiers' costs they have jointly elected to bear. This is an inescapable fact of life. And it is also inescapable that exactly half of the investors will get a result below the median result after the croupiers' take, which median result may well be somewhere between unexciting and lousy.

The model I like to sort of simplify the notion of what goes on in a market for common stocks is the pari-mutuel system at the racetrack. If you stop to think about it, a pari-mutuel system is a market. Everybody goes there and bets and the odds change based on what's bet. That's what happens in the stock market.

If people tell you what you really don't want to hear what's unpleasant-there's an almost automatic reaction of antipathy. You have to train yourself out of it.