If you have competence, you pretty much know its boundaries already. To ask the question (of whether you are past the boundary) is to answer it.

In investment management today, everybody wants not only to win, but to have a yearly outcome path that never diverges very much from a standard path except on the upside. Well, that is a very artificial, crazy construct. That's the equivalent in investment management to the custom of binding the feet of Chinese women

The Internet bubble circa 2000 is the most extreme in modern capitalism. In the 1930s, we had the worst depression in 600 years. Today is almost as extreme in the opposite way.

Financial institutions make us nervous when they're trying to do well.

Those who will not face improvements because they are changes, will face changes that are not improvements.

Our standard prescription for the know-nothing investor with a long-term time horizon is a no-load index fund. I think that works better than relying on your stock broker. The people who are telling you to do something else are all being paid by commissions or fees. The result is that while index fund investing is becoming more and more popular, by and large it's not the individual investors that are doing it. It's the institutions.

The name of the game is continuing to learn. Even if you're very well trained and have some natural aptitude, you still need to keep learning.