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

Everybody has some information. The function of the markets is to aggregate that information, evaluate it and get it incorporated into prices.

Everyone recognizes that's a joke because obviously the number and shape of the pieces doesn't affect the size of the pizza. And similarly, the stocks, bonds, warrants, etc., issued don't affect the aggregate value of the firm.

Diversification is your buddy.

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.

As an economics undergraduate, I also worked on a part-time basis in Cambridge, Massachusetts, for a company that was advising customers about portfolio decisions, writing reports.

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