People don't have a good intuitive sense of how to weigh new information in light of what they already know. They tend to overrate it.

People have different ways of interpreting history.

I was looking for something like baseball, where there's a lot of data and the competition was pretty low. That's when I discovered politics.

When a possibility is unfamiliar to us, we do not even think about it.

Actually, one of the better indicators historically of how well the stock market will do is just a Gallup poll, when you ask Americans if you think it's a good time to invest in stocks, except it goes the opposite direction of what you would expect. When the markets going up, it in fact makes it more prone toward decline.

You can build a statistical model and that's all well and good, but if you're dealing with a new type of financial instrument, for example, or a new type of situation - then the choices you're making are pretty arbitrary in a lot of respects.

To the extent that you can find ways where you're making predictions, there's no substitute for testing yourself on real-world situations that you don't know the answer to in advance.