The historical data support one conclusion with unusual force: To invest with success, you must be a long-term investor.

Reversion to the mean is the iron rule of the financial markets.

Income earned by the sweat of your brow should be taxed at the lowest rates, not the highest. Capital gains should be taxed at a higher rate.

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.

While I haven't read economist Robin Hahnel's work, replacing capitalism would be at the very bottom of my list of priorities - to be considered only after everything else had been tried. Improving our capitalistic system however, is at the top of my list and is of course the major theme of "The Battle for the Soul of Capitalism."

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