Enough: True Measures of Money, Business, and Life

(2) maintaining connectiveness with other human beings, in the form of love of our families, our pleasure in friends and colleagues, and an openness with those we meet in all walks of life

(3) exercising competence, using our God-given and self-motivated talents, inspired and striving to learn

Therefore, as I wrote in my Little Book of Common Sense Investing, “the stock market is a giant distraction from the business of investing.”

Investing is all about the long-term ownership of businesses. Speculation is precisely the opposite. It is all about the short-term trading, not long-term holding, of financial instruments—pieces of paper, not businesses—largely focused on the belief that their prices, as distinct from their intrinsic values, will rise.

Innovation in finance is designed largely to benefit those who create the complex new products, rather than those who own them.

It’s not money that determines our happiness, but the presence of some combination of these three attributes:

Keynes defined investment - he called it “enterprise” - as “forecasting the prospective yield of an asset over its entire life.” He defined speculation as “the activity of forecasting the market.”

The totally unpredictable perceptions of market participants, reflected in momentary stock prices and in the changing multiples that drive speculative returns, essentially have counted for nothing.

It is economics that controls long-term equity returns; the impact of emotions, so dominant in the short term, dissolves.