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.

you know you have made a theoretical advance when you can no longer reconstruct why you failed for so long to see the obvious.

One study found that people who just thought about watching their favorite movie actually raised their endorphin levels by 27 percent.

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.

Nothing in life is quite as important as you think it is while you're thinking about it.

Survival prospects are poor for an animal that is not suspicious of novelty.

Except for some effects that I attribute mostly to age, my intuitive thinking is just as prone to overconfidence, extreme predictions, and the planning fallacy as it was before I made a study of these issues.