My method for picking stocks has never changed. When businesses go from crappy to semicrappy, there's money to be made.

There's a company behind every stock and a reason companies - and their stocks - perform the way they do.

In our society, it's been the men who've handled most of the finances, and the women who've stood by and watched men botch things up.

Hold no more stocks than you can remain informed on.

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

When people discover they are no good at baseball or hockey, they put away their bats and their skates and they take up amateur golf or stamp collecting or gardening. But when people discover they are no good at picking stocks, they are likely to continue to do it anyway.

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.