The key thing about any fund is to make sure its expenses are low. You know, if you look at the funds in your plan and you see that they're all charging 1.5 and 2 percent,you've gota bad plan.

You have to ask yourself, what are the things that matter to you most in your life? If you have to have a latte every day that'snice to have right now, but if you take that latte every day right now, you may wind up eating cat food when you are 70. And you have to decide which is worse.

Market risk is like taking a plunge into a cool pool ... a lot of people are finding out right now what their risk tolerance is.

The typical fund company services 401k plan participants in the same way that Baby Face Nelson serviced banks.

The key aspect of an index fund is that many of them, not all of them, but many of them are extremely cheap.

An index fund is a fund that simply invests in all of the stocks in a market. So, for example, an index fund might invest in every single stock or almost every single stock in the U.S. market, it might invest in every single stock abroad, or it might invest in all of the bonds that are out there. And you can make a perfectly fine investing portfolio that mixes equal parts of all three of those.

It's human nature to find patterns where there are none and to find skill where luck is a more likely explanation (particularly if you're the lucky manager).