The definition of investment is the deferring ofpresent consumption for future consumption. So, you dohave to be willing to defer. And there are a couple of tricks that you can use to save money. One of them is simply to pay yourself first.

Mutual fund manager performance does not persist and the return of stock picking is zero.

There are two kinds of investors, be thay large or small: those who don't know where the market is headed, and those who don't know that they don't know.

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 bad enough that you have to take market risk. Only a fool takes on the additional risk of doing yet more damage by failing to diversify properly with his or her nest egg. Avoid the problem-buy a well-run index fund and own the whole market.

If your broker or investment advisor is not familiar with the concept of standard deviation of returns, get a new one.

The reason that 'guru' is such a popular word is because 'charlatan' is so hard to spell.