We might not be able to change our circumstances, but we CAN change our attitude.
99% of fund managers demonstrate no evidence of skill whatsoever.
Bluntly put, there's no chance that your doctor, dentist, or attorney is a high-school dropout. Your stockbroker, however, just might be.
The purpose of investing is not to simply optimise returns and make yourself rich. The purpose is not to die poor.
There are two kinds of investors, be they large or small: those who don't know where the market is headed and those who don't know what they don't know. Then again, there is a third type of investor: the investment professional, who indeed knows he doesn't know, but whose livelihood depends upon appearing to know.
The reason that 'guru' is such a popular word is because 'charlatan' is so hard to spell.
You have to understand your own psychology. You have to understand that human beings weren't really designed to invest. We have all these emotions that are appropriate responses if you're being chased by a tiger, but they're terrible responses if you've got a 30-year time horizon to think about investment or when you're trying to manage investment over 30 years.
I would reject the distinction between a Keynesian moment and a behavioral moment.
Repentance was never yet produced in any man's heart apart from the grace of God. As soon may you expect the leopard to regret the blood with which its fangs are moistened,—as soon might you expect the lion of the wood to abjure his cruel tyranny over the feeble beasts of the plain, as expect the sinner to make any confession, or offer any repentance that shall be accepted of God, unless grace shall first renew the heart.
Doing the right thing is easy. [It is] much more difficult [to. . . ] figure out what [the right thing] is.
Perfect hexagonal tubes in a packed array. Bees are hard-wired to lay them down, but how does an insect know enough geometry to lay down a precise hexagon? It doesn't. It's programmed to chew up wax and spit it out while turning on its axis, and that generates a circle. Put a bunch of bees on the same surface, chewing side-by-side, and the circles abut against each other - deform each other into hexagons, which just happen to be more efficient for close packing anyway.