But whatever the consensus on the EMH, I know of no serious academic, professional money manager, trained security analyst, or intelligent individual investor who would disagree with the thrust of EMH: The stock market itself is a demanding taskmaster. It sets a high hurdle that few investors can leap.

Fund investors are confident that they can easily select superior fund managers. They are wrong.

Your success in investing will depend in part on your character and guts, and in part on your ability to realize at the height of ebullience and the depth of despair alike that this too shall pass.

It's 1450 out of 1500 ETF funds that I just wouldn't touch because they're not diversified enough. Or they have some huge speculative twist to them that if you can guess the markets right you will do very well for a day or two but who can do that? Nobody.

If it is hard to imagine that 20% of losses on the stock market, you should never participate

Managed funds are astonishingly tax-inefficient.

We need to reorganize our entire system of retirement plan investing and to develop federal standards of fiduciary duty for pension trustees and fund managers. These require "top down" intervention. But we also need investors to look after their own economic interests, a bottom up approach to our problems that is well within our individual power to undertake.