“The only guarantee, ever, is that things will go wrong. The only thing we can use to mitigate this is anticipation.” – Ryan Holiday In the book Obstacle is the Way author Ryan Holiday describes the benefits of the performing a premortem (emphasis mine): In a postmortem, doctors convene to examine the causes of a patient’s…

“But I like to ponder. And pondering things, just sort of thinking about it and thinking about it, turns out to be a pretty good approach.” – Jim Simons

“What goes up comes down, and what goes down comes back up.” – Mark Mobius

“There is no such thing as a perfect portfolio. We’ll only know what was perfect in retrospect. There is, however, a portfolio strategy that will meet your needs. It’s conceived from your financial situation, your understanding of risk, your time horizon and your desires.” – Rick Ferri MarketWatch columnist Brett Arends has been looking for…

“This is one of the most important rules of investing. If you never peek from the age of 20 to the age of 70, you’ll rip that first 401(k) statement open at age 70, and I recommend you have a doctor on hand because you’ll go into a dead faint. Your heart might even stop….

“Doc Brown was the brains of the operation, but Marty McFly would have done better on CNBC.” – Jeff Macke In Clash of the Financial Pundits, Jeff Macke asks CNBC contributor Karen Finerman if most people are better off not watching financial television every day. Here was her response: You’re maybe better off – not maybe;…

“Job one for the investor, then, is to learn as best she can, to ignore the day-to-day and year-to-year speculative return in order to earn the fundamental return.” – William Bernstein William Bernstein continues to put out thought-provoking, no-nonsense books on investing. Rational Expectations: Asset Allocation for Investing Adults is his latest and it didn’t…

“This [value investing] is a pretty good thing to have as part of your portfolio but it does not always work, cause nothing does.” – Cliff Asness In his recent speech at the Morningstar Conference, Cliff Asness of AQR Capital Management shared his thoughts on the two main reasons that value investing works: (1) Cheap…

My thoughts on the annual Morningstar Conference.

“Unless you can watch your stock holding decline by 50% without becoming panic-stricken, you should not be in the stock market.” – Warren Buffett A good starting point to gauge investment performance is to compare your results against a simple buy and hold portfolio. While there are certainly ways to improve the performance of buy and hold,…