We live in a very risky world and investors should not get "carried away" with excessive allocations to equities, or for that matter, real estate. As always asset allocation and low cost and broad diversification will be essential in earning one's fair share of whatever returns our financial markets are generous enough to bestow upon us.

Managed funds are astonishingly tax-inefficient.

I will create value for society, rather than extract it.

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.

The general systems of money management today require people to pretend to do something they can't do and like something they don't. It's a funny business because on a net basis, the whole investment management business together gives no value added to all buyers combined. That's the way it has to work. Mutual funds charge two percent per year and then brokers switch people between funds, costing another three to four percentage points. The poor guy in the general public is getting a terrible product from the professionals.

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.

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.