A romantic striving for an impossible ideal.

As the bull market goes on, people who take great risks achieve great rewards, seemingly without punishment. It's like crime without punishment or sex without sin.

By the late 1980s people realized that houses did not always appreciate and that they could fluctuate like any other market commodity.

In the 1970s we saw a massive shift of household savings from the banks to the brokerage firms.

The Great Inflation of the 1970s destroyed faith in paper assets, because if you held a bond, suddenly the bond was worth much less money than it was before.

Mutual funds have historically offered safety and diversification. And they spare you the responsibility of picking individual stocks.

The American public historically was really not part of the stock market.