It would be easier to screw up American Express than Coke or Gillette, but it's an immensely strong business.

The more hard lessons you can learn vicariously rather than through your own hard experience, the better.

You must value the business in order to value the stock.

... some important factor doesn't lose its "share of force" just because some "expert" can better measure other types of force.

Where you have complexity, by nature you can have fraud and mistakes. You'll have more of that than in a company that shovels sand from a river and sells it. This will always be true of financial companies, including ones run by governments. If you want accurate numbers from financial companies, you're in the wrong world.

The stupid and dishonest accountants allowed the genie of totally inappropriate accounting to descend on derivatives books. And once this has happened - people get status, etc. - it's impossible to get it back into the bottle.

Fancy computers are engaging in legalized front-running. The profits are clearly coming from the rest of us - our college endowments and our pensions. Why is this legal? What the hell is the government thinking? It's like letting rats into a restaurant.