Sublime

“Choosing individual stocks without any idea of what you’re looking for is like running through a dynamite factory with a burning match. You may live, but you’re still an idiot.”

Morgan’s famous testimony to Congress that character came before money or property.

I have come to feel that it is as necessary to know how to read myself as to know how to read the tape.

Tom R. Willis, the son of Tom Willis and close enough to Dennis to consider him an uncle, said that Dennis simply had a sense of proportion that was different from the rest of the world’s: “When he perceived that he had an edge, he would go all into a position with mammoth trading size.”

The threat to a buy-and-hold program is the investor himself. Following his stocks and listening to stories and advice about them can lead to trading actively, producing on average the inferior results about which I’ve warned. Buying an index avoids this trap.

This great acquisitive era ended in the market collapse of 1973–74, when Wall Street finally realized that the best and the brightest were not as ingenious as expected, and even the most charming of corporate directors could not turn all those toads they bought into princes.

Treasure honorable people who are capable and will treat you well even when you’re not looking.

“The market is rarely dead wrong. The history books are littered with people who are ‘smarter than the market’ who have lost all their money. When you’re in an investment and it’s not working out, you really need to take a step back: ‘What don’t I understand in this situation?’ If you really think you’ve resolved all the unknowns that you can possi