Quotes from Larry E. Swedroe

Your ultimate success or failure will depend on your ability to ignore the worries of the world long enough to allow your investments to succeed. It isn't the head, but the stomach that determines [your] fate. —Peter Lynch, Beating the Street

The efficient market hypothesis (EMH) explains this phenomenon: current market prices reflect the total knowledge and expectations of all investors, and it is highly unlikely that one investor can know more than the market does collectively. For

Today, the U.S. markets account for approximately 50 percent of the global equity markets total capitalization. Since

Do you have the fortitude and discipline to stick with your predetermined investment strategy (asset allocation) when the going gets rough?" Successful investment management depends to a large degree on the ability of an individual to withstand the periods of stress and on his/her ability to overcome the severe emotional hurdles present during bear markets like the ones experienced in 1973–74 and 2000–02. In

The only thing that hurts more than paying an income tax is not having to pay an income tax. —Lord Thomas R. Duwar

Index funds generally buy and hold all the securities within a particular index in a market cap—weighted fashion. Thus while an S&P 500 Index fund would own all five hundred stocks that comprise the index, it would not own an equal amount of each of the five hundred stocks. The largest holding might, for example, be 5 percent of the entire portfolio. There

Markets compensate investors with expected returns commensurate with the degree of risk they take. By investing in asset classes that are higher risk, and therefore higher return, an investor can expect to outperform the market as a whole—while acknowledging that they are accepting greater risk. These higher risk, higher expected return asset classes are small-capitalization stocks, value stocks, and small-value stocks. An

While investing in equities always entails risk, the longer the investment horizon, the more likely it is that equity investors will be rewarded for taking incremental risk—assuming they have the ability to remain disciplined during periods of economic crisis. Disciplined investors think bear markets are really just periods when the market temporarily wears a big "for sale" sign. On

As author Nick Murray says: "Success is purely a function of two things: 1) recognition of the inevitability of major market declines; and 2) emotional/behavioral preparation to regard such declines as non-events.

The safest port in a sea of uncertainty is diversification.

I don't judge the quality of my decisions by the outcome