When you leave a good job to go off on your own and don't expect to make money for a while, you name the firm whatever your wife says you should.

As an investor my job is to figure out what will happen rather than what should happen.

A 99% Value-at-Risk calculation does not evaluate what happens in the last one percent... This is like an airbag that works all the time, except when you have a car accident.

What do you call a stock that's down 90%? A stock that was down 80% and then got cut in half.

Microsoft has one more shot at a role in smart phone software through its deployment on Nokia phones. Nokia is still the global market share leader in cell phones. Maybe it will work out, but this is hard to envision great success in the area coming on the heels of so much disappointment in missed opportunity in this important and visible category.

The loss was not bad luck. It was bad analysis.

One of the best investors around, Joel Greenblatt, has written a popular, charming and funny book about investing in great companies at low P/E multiples. To simplify an already simple book, great companies are generally measured as companies that can generate lots of profit without requiring a lot of capital. This means that they have high ROEs.