If you're very talented and keep winning, you'll do just fine. It may take a while. But the talent is hard to identify and talent is hard to tell from luck. There's an awful lot of luck in this business. Past performance is not helpful in judging future performance.

Among my greatest disappointments about the mutual fund industry - in addition to excessive costs and excessive focus on the short-term - is that fund managers have been passive participants in corporate governance.

The courage to press on regardless - regardless of whether we face calm seas or rough seas, and especially when the market storms howl around us - is the quintessential attribute of the successful investor.

Capitalism is not a Ponzi scheme. Capitalism is a scheme of free markets.

Managed funds are astonishingly tax-inefficient.

Our capitalistic scheme in the latter years of the 20th century seems to have lost its way. We've had a "pathalogical change" from traditional owners capitalism where most of the rewards have gone to those who make the investments and assume the risks to a new and deeply flawed system of managers capitalism where the managers of our corporations our investment system, and our mutual funds are simply take too large a share of the returns generated by our corporations and mutual funds leaving the last line investors - pension beneficiaries and mutual fund owners at the bottom of the food chain.

Without getting into brothels, there are ethical capitalists the problem is that there aren't enough of them. It is not "just a few bad apples" that have been evident in our corporations, our investment bankers and our mutual funds, but so many that one has to concede that the barrel itself needs some work.