The illusion of skill is not only an individual aberration; it is deeply ingrained in the culture of the [investment management] industry.

The average investor's return is significantly lower than market indices due primarily to market timing.

All of us would be better investors if we just made fewer decisions.

We were required to predict a soldier's performance in officer training and in combat, but we did so by evaluating his behavior over one hour in an artificial situation. This was a perfect instance of a general rule that I call WYSIATI, "What you see is all there is." We had made up a story from the little we knew but had no way to allow for what we did not know about the individual's future, which was almost everything that would actually matter. When you know as little as we did, you should not make extreme predictions like "He will be a star."

One emphasis of my research has been on the question of how people spend their time. Time is the ultimate finite resource, or course, so the question of how people spend it would seem to be important.

I would be wary of experts' intuition, except when they deal with something that they have dealt with a lot in the past.

We don't see very far in the future, we are very focused on one idea at a time, one problem at a time, and all these are incompatible with rationality as economic theory assumes it.