Over the long term, despite significant drops from time to time, stocks (especially an intelligently selected stock portfolio) will be one of your best investment options. The trick is to GET to the long term. Think in terms of 5 years, 10 years and longer. Do your planning and asset allocation ahead of time. Choose a portion of your assets to invest in the stock market - and stick with it! Yes, the bad times will come, but over the truly long term, the good times will win out - and I hope the lessons from 2008 will help get you there to enjoy them.

There’s a virtuous cycle when people have to defend challenges to their ideas. Any gaps in thinking or analysis become clear pretty quickly when smart people ask good, logical questions. You can’t be a good value investor without being an independent thinker – you’re seeing valuations that the market is not appreciating. But it’s critical that you understand why the market isn’t seeing the value you do. The back and forth that goes on in the investment process helps you get at that.

I think the exercise of trying to figure out how to simplify concepts has been incredibly helpful to me over the last 13 years of teaching and I hope my students have benefited from it.

Choosing individual stocks without any idea of what you're looking for is like running through a dynamite factory with a burning match. You may live, but you're still an idiot.

If you spend your energies looking for and analysing situations not closely followed by other informed investors, your chance of finding bargains greatly increases.

Look down, not up, when making your initial investment decision. If you don’t lose money, most of the remaining alternatives are good ones.

The more confidence I have in each one of my stock picks, the fewer companies I need to own in my portfolio to feel comfortable.