The prevailing view has been that the market will earn a high rate of return if the holding period is long enough, but entry point is what really matters.

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 prevailing view has been that the market will earn a high rate of return if the holding period is long enough, but entry point is what really matters.

My experience is that short sellers do far better analysis than long buyers because they have to. The market is biased upward over time-as the saying goes, stocks are for the long run.

Investing is the intersection of economics and psychology. The analysis is actually the easy part. The economics, the valuation of the business isn't that hard. The psychology - how much do you buy, do you buy it at this price, do you wait for a lower price, what do you do when it looks like the world might end - those things are harder. Knowing whether you stand there, buy more, or whether something has legitimately gone wrong and you need to sell, those are harder things. That you learn with experience, by having the right psychological makeup.

The average person can’t really trust anybody. They can’t trust a broker, because the broker is interested in churning commissions. They can’t trust a mutual fund, because the mutual fund is interested in gathering a lot of assets and keeping them. And now it’s even worse because even the most sophisticated people have no idea what’s going on.

If another person were to enter the building, it would once again be empty.