“The most instructive, indeed the only method of learning to bear with dignity the vicissitude of fortune, is to recall the catastrophe of others.” – Polybius One of my favorite expressions about the behavior of investors is that we are constantly fighting the last war. The representative heuristic causes us to overweight recent events when…

“It is better to be roughly right than precisely wrong.” – John Maynard Keynes Jeremy Siegel first released Stocks for the Long Run in 1994.  There are people that partially credit this book with some of the stock mania that took hold in the late-1990s. Siegel did call the bubble in tech stocks before the…

“Hey, why don’t I just go eat some hay, make things out of clay, lay by the bay? I just may! What’d ya say?” – Happy Gilmore You know a comedy movie is going to be terrible if they can’t even string together enough funny parts for the trailer.  The new Adam Sandler-Drew Barrymore movie…

“It’s virtually impossible for young workers to deploy their investment capital too aggressively, because their human capital overwhelms it.” – William Bernstein Millennials have been taking it on the chin lately for their lack of basic financial knowledge and understanding. There was a fascinating piece in The Week by Ryan Cooper called The Confessions of…

“Being passive doesn’t mean doing nothing.” – Larry Swedroe One of the first decisions you need to make in the process of building an investment portfolio is whether you will be an active or a passive investor.  Most investors assume this means making the choice between index funds and active management, but that’s too much…

“Wealth isn’t primarily determined by investment performance, but by investment behavior.” – Nick Murray I’m convinced that the majority of the behavioral problems that affect most individual and professional investors are all about perspective, not implementing the wrong tactics. There will always be more tactics presented to you every single day, but most of them…

“Because people play an important role in determining the course of the financial markets, stock prices move like a manic-depressive.” – Howard Marks It looks like trading by individual investors is making a comeback. According to the Wall Street Journal, TD Ameritrade, E*Trade and Charles Schwab have all posted huge gains in trading volume to…

“If I were an executive coach, I would try to focus each individual on the facets they can control. Emphasizing what’s in your control allows you to adopt an attitude of equanimity toward luck. You’ve done all that you can, and from there you have to live with the results—good or bad.” – Michael Mauboussin…

“Truth be told, if you keep buying high and selling low, you should stay out of the stock market, because you’re losing money. Your primary goal as an investor should be not to lose money.” – Carl Richards In summer of 2009, I sat in on a panel discussion consisting of 3 or 4 portfolio…

“Short-term crashes can be painful, but long-term returns are far more important to wealth creation and destruction.” – Cliff Asness Deep Risk was my favorite of the William Bernstein trilogy of Investing for Adults series of Kindle books. He sets out to show how investors should think about the stock market and then gives a couple of…