It's a fact: stock investors sometimes lose money on their way to wealth. Get over it.

Quinn's First Law of Investing is never to buy anything whose price you can't follow in the newspapers. An investment without a public marketplace attracts the fabulists the way picnics attract ants. Stock brokers and financial planners can tell you anything they want, because no one really knows what's true. The First Corollary to Quinn's First Law states that, even when the price is in the newspapers, you shouldn't buy anything too complex to explain to the average 12-year-old.

No one knows what stocks will do tomorrow, but the evidence is clear as to how they'll perform over 10 or 20 years. They will almost certainly go up.

You normally don't get a margin call unless your securities, minus the debt, are worth 30% or less of their nominal market value.

Equality is never given, it is taken.

It seems like only yesterday that savers were dorks. They kept piggy banks. They drove last year's cars. They fished in their change purses for nickels while the superstars flashed credit cards. Today, values have changed. The new object of veneration is not money on the hoof but money in the bank - and the dorks all have it.

The chief function of stock-market forecasters is to make astrologers look respectable.