“Gifted, determined, ambitious professionals have come into investment management in such large numbers during the past 30 years that it may no longer be feasible for any of them to profit from the errors of all the other sufficiently often and by sufficient magnitude to beat market averages.” – Charles Ellis, 1975 Ted Williams is…

“The bad news is that reaching for yield rarely ends well.” – James Montier “Now, if you’re chasing yield, and you’re trying to make your fixed income “do” better, then all bets are off. That’s a dangerous game.” – Carl Richards I’ve been getting a lot of questions lately about peer to peer lending as…

“Even the intelligent investor is likely to need considerable will power to keep from following the crowd.” – Benjamin Graham The chart below, from Scott Krisiloff of Avondale Asset Management, shows the 15 top performing stocks from the Russell 1000 Index since 2003.

“Most people get interested in stocks when everyone else is. The time to get interested is when no one else is.” – Warren Buffett “If it makes me feel like I want to throw up, I can be pretty sure it’s a great investment.” – Brian Posner I hate some of the investments in my…

“Far more money has been lost by investors preparing for corrections, or trying to anticipate corrections, than has been lost in corrections themselves.  I can’t recall ever once having seen the name of a market timer on Forbes’ annual list of the richest people in the world.  If it were truly possible to predict corrections,…

“Instead of concentrating on the central issue of creating sensible long-term asset-allocation targets, investors too frequently focus on the unproductive diversions of security selection and market timing.” – David Swensen “One of the things you learn about asset allocation is that the unemotional defeat the emotional over time by fading their highs and lows, their…

Take a look at this really great new tool from the New York Times (click to enlarge): Like most financial calculators, you enter in your basic information (salary, % saved, salary increase, expected returns and time horizon). But, this one has the added benefit of showing you how your results would be different if you…

“If we become increasingly humble about how little we know, we may be more eager to search.” – Sir John Templeton John Templeton was one of the greatest investors of all-time. He was a well-known value investor and a natural contrarian who was successful at buying during times of maximum pessimism. Here’s one of his…

“From financial history and from my own experience, I long ago concluded that regression to the mean is the most powerful law in financial physics: Periods of above-average performance are inevitably followed by below-average returns, and bad times inevitably set the stage for surprisingly good performance.” – Jason Zwieg Investors love to tell themselves stories…

“Stocks are the thing to own over time. Productivity will increase and stocks will increase with it. There are only a few things you can do wrong. One is to buy or sell at the wrong time. Paying high fees is the other way to get killed. The best way to avoid both of these…