The worst thing you can do is invest in companies you know nothing about. Unfortunately, buying stocks on ignorance is still a popular American pastime.

The biggest winners are surprises to me, and takeovers are even more surprising. It takes years, not months, to produce big results.

Often, there is no correlation between the success of a company's operations and the success of its stock over a few months or even a few years. In the long term, there is a 100 percent correlation between the success of the company and the success of its stock. This disparity is the key to making money; it pays to be patient, and to own successful companies.

I talk to hundreds of companies a year and spend hour after hour in heady pow-wows with CEOs, financial analysts and my colleagues in the mutual-fund business, but I stumble onto the big winners in extracurricular situations, the same way you do.

Everyone has the brainpower to follow the stock market. If you made it through fifth-grade math, you can do it.

If you hope to have more money tomorrow than you have today, you've got to put a chunk of your assets into stocks. Sooner or later, a portfolio of stocks or stock mutual funds will turn out to be a lot more valuable than a portfolio of bonds or CDs or money-market funds.

You have to let the big ones make up for your mistakes.