Most of the moments of our life - and I calculated, you know, the psychological present is said to be about three seconds long; that means that, you know, in a life there are about 600 million of them; in a month, there are about 600,000 - most of them don't leave a trace.

There is general agreement among researchers that nearly all stock pickers, whether they know it or not-and few of them do-are playing a game of chance.

In a rising market, enough of your bad ideas will pay off so that you'll never learn that you should have fewer ideas.

Political columnists and sports pundits are rewarded for being overconfident.

To know whether you can trust a particular intuitive judgment, there are two questions you should ask: Is the environment in which the judgment is made sufficiently regular to enable predictions from the available evidence? The answer is yes for diagnosticians, no for stock pickers. Do the professionals have an adequate opportunity to learn the cues and the regularities? The answer here depends on the professionals' experience and on the quality and speed with which they discover their mistakes.

There's a tendency to look at investments in isolation. Investors focus on the risk of individual securities.

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