If owning stocks is a long-term project for you, following their changes constantly is a very, very bad idea. It's the worst possible thing you can do, because people are so sensitive to short-term losses. If you count your money every day, you'll be miserable.

The amount of success it takes for leaders to become overconfident isn't terribly large.

Mental effort, I would argue, is relatively rare. Most of the time we coast.

Unfortunately, skill in evaluating the business prospects of a firm is not sufficient for successful stock trading, where the key question is whether the information about the firm is already incorporated in the price of the stock. Traders apparently lackthe skill to answer this crucial question, but they appear to be ignorant of their ignorance.

One of the problems with expertise is that people have it in some domains and not in others.

You should expect little or nothing from Wall Street stock pickers who hope to be more accurate than the market in predicting the future of prices. And you should not expect much from pundits making long-term forecasts.

Acquisition of skills requires a regular environment, an adequate opportunity to practice, and rapid and unequivocal feedback about the correctness of thoughts and actions.