Speculation leads you the wrong way. It allows you to put your emotions first, whereas investment gets emotions out of the picture.

The miracle of compounding returns has been overwhelmed by the tyranny of compounding costs.

Rely on the ordinary virtues that intelligent, balanced human beings have relied on for centuries: common sense, thrift, realistic expectations, patience, and perseverance.

We need a federal government commission to study the way our financial services system is working - I believe it is working badly - and we also need more educated investors. There are good long term low-priced mutual funds - my favorite is a total stock market index fund - and bad short term highly priced mutual funds. If investors would get themselves educated, and invest in the former - taking their money out of the latter - we would see some automatic improvements in the system, and see them fairly quickly.

The grim irony of investing, then, is that we investors as a group not only don't get what we pay for, we get precisely what we don't pay for. So if we pay for nothing, we get everything.

It's very difficult for any particular segment of the stock market to sustain superior performance. The watch word for our financial markets is, "reversion to the mean" i.e. what goes up must come down, and it's true more often than you can imagine.

Managed funds are astonishingly tax-inefficient.