It's very difficult for any particular segment of the stock market to sustain superior performance. The watch word for our financial markets is, "reversion to the mean" i.e. what goes up must come down, and it's true more often than you can imagine.

I think we all ought to be careful about too much generalization on this issue, even as I confess to painting with a pretty broad brush myself!

The multiple failings of our flawed financial sector are jeopardizing, not only the retirement security of our nation's savers but the economy in which our entire society participates.

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.

"Now you can trade the S&P 500 Index in real time" was the slogan in the newspapers for the first ETF. What kind of nut would do that?

In the long run, investing is not about markets at all. Investing is about enjoying the returns earned by businesses.

The mutual fund industry has been built, in a sense, on witchcraft.