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.

It's amazing how difficult it is for a man to understand something if he's paid a small fortune not to understand it.

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.

The returns we read about in the industry sales literature vastly diminish when we move from the theoretical world of market indexes to the real world of actually investing.

Time is your friend; impulse is your enemy.

If the data do not prove that indexing wins, well, the data are wrong.

Sure there are some companies at the margins of our society that probably do that and I think we all have the responsibility as consumers and as investors to avoid them like the plague. If we do, they won't last very long. Doing what's right is the only possible formula for long-term - I emphasize long term - business success.