Average investors can become experts in their own field and can pick winning stocks as effectively as Wall Street professionals by doing just a little research.

If you're lucky enough to have been rewarded in life to the degree that I have, there comes a point at which you have to decide whether to become a slave to your net worth by devoting the rest of your life to increasing it or to let what you've accumulated begin to serve you.

Avoid hot stocks in hot industries.

Twenty years in this business convinces me that any normal person using the customary three percent of the brain can pick stocks just as well, if not better, than the average Wall Street expert.

I think you have to learn that there's a company behind every stock, and that there's only one real reason why stocks go up. Companies go from doing poorly to doing well or small companies grow to large companies.

If you have the stomach for stocks, but neither the time nor the inclination to do the homework, invest in equity mutual funds.

When even the analysts are bored, it's time to start buying.