“Nothing obscures your financial judgment on investments more than the site of your neighbor getting rich.” – JP Morgan A research study posed the following question: which new employee would be happier, the person making $36,000 in a firm where the starting salary is $40,000 or the one making $34,000 where the average is $30,000?…

“Unless you can watch your stock holdings decline by 50% without becoming panic-stricken, you should not be in the stock market.” – Warren Buffett Doug Kass posed a fair question on Twitter this week: The first thing that popped into my head was ‘younger investors should welcome regular market declines.’ I’ve been working in the…

“The good news is that in reality, risk and diversification are about what happens over the long haul, not during a punishing downturn like 2007-2009.” – William Bernstein In Skating Where the Puck Was, William Bernstein tackles one of the central tenets of any comprehensive investment plan — diversification. Specifically, Bernstein discusses correlation among the…

“The world of finance hails the invention of the wheel over and over again, often in a slightly more unstable version.” – J.K. Galbraith Earlier this week I set out to define ‘This time is different.’ It’s a tough one to explain considering markets are always different because they’re complex, adaptive systems. But it’s never…

“The rich invest in time, the poor invest in money.” – Warren Buffett Some nice pep talk material via the Wall Street Journal: Seventy-five percent of ultra-high net worth people ($30 million or more in net assets) in North America are self-made according to this survey. That’s a shocking number, but one that should offer…

“The biggest investing errors come not from factors that are informational or analytical, but from those that are psychological.” – Howard Marks In John Templeton’s timeless 16 rules for Investment Success (published in 1933) he states: “The investor who says, ‘This time is different,’ when in fact it’s virtually a repeat of an earlier situation, has…

“The average long-term experience in investing is never surprising, but the short-term experience is always surprising.” – Charles Ellis

“The Prussian General Clausewitz has said, ‘The greatest enemy of a good plan is the dream of a perfect plan.’ And I believe that an index strategy is a good strategy.” – John Bogle

“Humanity is now entering a period of radical transformation in which technology has the potential to significantly raise the basic standards of living for every man, woman and child on the planet.” – Peter Diamandis I’m a fairly optimistic person, but it can be difficult at times to keep a glass-is-half-full mentality when the majority…

“This year I invested in pumpkins. They’ve been going up the whole month of October and I got a feeling they’re going to peak right around January. Then bang! That’s when I’ll cash in.” – Homer Simpson