But in practice, if often comes down to not suffering a loss as big as the huge gain you made a while ago.

You only need to make one big score in finance to be a hero forever.

If there's 10,000 people looking at the stocks and trying to pick winners, one in 10,000 is going to score, by chance alone, a great coup, and that's all that's going on. It's a game, it's a chance operation, and people think they are doing something purposeful... but they're really not.

... Any pension fund manager who doesn't have the vast majority-and I mean 70% or 80% of his or her portfolio-in passive investments is guilty of malfeasance, nonfeasance or some other kind of bad feasance!

I should mention that I am a member of the board of directors of Dimensional Fund Advisors.

I had some of the students in my finance class actually do some empirical work on capital structures, to see if we could find any obvious patterns in the data, but we couldn't see any.

To beat the market you'll have to invest serious bucks to dig up information no one else has yet.