Quotes from Burton G. Malkiel

October. This is one of the peculiarly dangerous months to speculate in stocks in. The others are July, January, September, April, November, May, March, June, December, August and February. —Mark Twain, Pudd'nhead Wilson

In addition, your psychological makeup will influence the degree of risk you should assume. One investment adviser suggests that you consider what kind of Monopoly player you once were (or still are). Were you a plunger? Did you construct hotels on Boardwalk and Park Place? True, the other players seldom landed on your property, but

when they did, you could win the whole game in one fell swoop. Or did you prefer the steadier but moderate income from the orange monopoly of St. James Place, Tennessee Avenue, and New York Avenue? The answers to these questions may give you some insight into your psychological makeup with respect to investing.

Laszlo Birinyi, in his book Master Trader, has calculated that a buy-and-hold investor would have seen one dollar invested in the Dow Jones Industrial Average in 1900 grow to $290 by the start of 2013. Had that investor missed the best five days each year, however, that dollar investment would have been worth less than a penny in 2013.

Daniel Kahneman has argued that this tendency to overconfidence is particularly strong among investors. More than most other groups, investors tend to exaggerate their own skill and deny the role of chance. They overestimate their own knowledge, underestimate the risks involved, and exaggerate their ability to control events.

To overcome the drag of expenses and taxes, an actively managed fund would have to outperform the market by 4.3 percentage points per year just to break even with index funds.* The odds that you can find an actively managed mutual fund that will perform that much better than an index fund are virtually zero.

These very sad stories make all too clear the cardinal rule of investing: Broad diversification is essential.

Protect yourself: Every investor should always diversify.

Diversify across securities, across asset classes, across markets—and across time.

Lynch calculated each potential stock's P/E-to-growth ratio (or PEG ratio) and would buy for his portfolio only those stocks with high growth relative to their P/Es. This was not simply a low P/E strategy, because a stock with a 50 percent growth rate and a P/E of 25 (PEG ratio of ½) was deemed far better than a stock with 20 percent growth and a P/E of 20 (PEG ratio of

One asset class that belongs in most portfolios is bonds. Bonds are basically IOUs issued by corporations and government units. (The government units might be foreign, state and local, or government-sponsored enterprises such as the Federal National Mortgage Association, popularly known as Fannie Mae.) And just as you should diversify by holding a broadly diversified stock fund, so should you hold a broadly diversified bond fund.

Unlike common stocks, whose dividends and earnings fluctuate with the ups and downs of the company's business, bonds pay a fixed dollar amount of interest. If the U.S. Treasury offers a $1,000 20-year, 5 percent bond, that bond will pay $50 per year until it matures, when the principal will be repaid. Corporate bonds are less safe, but widely diversified bond portfolios have provided reasonably stable interest returns over time.

So-called "total stock market" funds will include both real estate companies and commodity products. Broad equity diversification can be achieved with one-stop shopping.

As an investor, what should you do about forecasts—forecasts of the stock market, forecasts of interest rates, forecasts of the economy? Answer: Nothing. You can save time, anxiety, and money by ignoring all market forecasts.

Does achieving extremely broad diversification seem completely out of reach for ordinary investors? Fear not. There are broadly invested, very low-cost funds that can provide one-stop shopping solutions. We will recommend a broadly diversified United States total stock market index fund that includes real estate companies and commodity producers, including gold miners. We

Just as contagious euphoria leads investors to take greater and greater risks, the same self-destructive behavior leads many investors to throw in the towel and sell out near the market's bottom when pessimism is rampant and seems most convincing. One of the most important lessons you can learn about investing is to avoid following the herd and getting caught up in market-based overconfidence or discouragement. Beware of "Mr. Market.

You should diversify over time. Don't make all your investments at a single time. If

Note also that during the punishing bear market of 2007–2008, new record withdrawals were made by investors who threw in the towel and sold their mutual fund shares—at record lows—just before the first, and often best, part of a market recovery.

Indeed, when pessimism is rampant and market prices are down is the worst time to sell out or to stop making regular investment contributions. The time to buy is when stocks are on sale.

You don't care if it's cold and raining or warm and sunny 10,000 miles away because it's not your weather. The same detachment should apply to your 401(k) investments until you approach retirement. Even

The stock market as a whole has delivered an average rate of return of about 9½ percent over long periods of time. But that return only measures what a buy-and-hold investor would earn by putting money in at the start of the period and keeping her money invested through thick and thin. In

Only those who will be sellers of equities in the near future should be happy at seeing stocks rise. Prospective purchasers should much prefer sinking prices.

The point is that market timers risk missing the infrequent large sprints that are the big contributors to performance.

The implications are simple. If past prices contain little or no useful information for predicting future prices, there is no point in following technical trading rules. A simple policy of buying and holding will be at least as good as any technical procedure. Moreover, buying and selling, to the extent that it is profitable, tends to generate taxable capital gains.