Macro worries are like sports talk radio. Everyone has a good opinion which probably means that none of them are good.

It's incredibly important to note that when you don't allow failure, you get more failure.

Almost no one will accept responsibility for his or her role in precipitating a crisis: not leveraged speculators, not willfully blind leaders of financial institutions, and certainly not regulators, government officials, ratings agencies or politicians.

The avoidance of loss is the surest way to ensure a profitable outcome.

The latest trade of a security creates a dangerous illusion that its market price approximates its true value. This mirage is especially dangerous during periods of market exuberance. The concept of "private market value" as an anchor to the proper valuation of a business can also be greatly skewed during ebullient times and should always be considered with a healthy degree of skepticism.

Over the long run, the crowd is always wrong.

Speculators are obsessed with predicting: guessing the direction of stock prices. Every morning on cable television, every afternoon on the stock market report, every weekend in Barron's, every week in dozens of market newsletters, and whenever business people get together. In reality, no one knows what the market will do; trying to predict it is a waste of time, and investing based upon that prediction is a purely speculative undertaking.