The basic story remains simple and never-ending. Stocks aren't lottery tickets. There's a company attached to every share.

If you can find a company that can get away with raising prices year after year without losing customers (an addictive product such as cigarettes fills the bill), you've got a terrific investment.

You can find good reasons to scuttle your equities in every morning paper and on every broadcast of the nightly news.

Spend at least as much time researching a stock as you would choosing a refrigerator.

It would be wonderful if we could avoid the setbacks with timely exits, but nobody has figured out how to predict them.

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

Bargains are the holy grail of the true stockpicker. The fact that 10 to 30 percent of our net worth is lost in a market sell-off is of little consequence. We see the latest correction not as a disaster but as an opportunity to acquire more shares at low prices. This is how great fortunes are made over time.