Quotes from William J. Bernstein

If you are such an individual and become upset when one of your asset classes does poorly, even when the rest of your portfolio is doing well, then you should not be managing your own money.

nuclei accumbens fire not only with reward, but even more intensely with its anticipation, be it culinary, sexual, social, or financial.

Nestorian Christians, expelled for their heresies from the Byzantine Empire but tolerated in the Muslim world as "people of the book," began to arrive from the West via the overland route. It is easy to see how a splinter Christian movement, repelled by the savage intolerance of the Catholic Church and attracted by the relative tolerance of Islam, spread ever eastward.

instead of investing a stream of savings, you have just inherited a lump sum of money at age 25 from Uncle Fred that is large enough to fund your retirement at age 65

The commercial banker performs three near-sacred functions central to any capitalist society: the safeguarding of other people's money; the provision of working capital to businesses, without which the economy cannot function; and the creation of money. By contrast, the investment banker sells stocks and bonds to the public, a much riskier and morally more ambiguous activity.

I see the supposed convenience of being able to trade ETFs throughout the day as a psychological disadvantage. Unless you are able to predict intraday market moves—a fool's errand if ever there was one—you are faced with the oftentimes paralyzing choice of exactly when to buy or sell.

the best fishing is done in the most stormy waters.

P. J. O'Rourke: "North Korea has a 99% literacy rate, a disciplined, hardworking society, and a $900 per capita GDP. Morocco has a 43.7% literacy rate, a society that spends all day drinking coffee and pestering tourists to buy rugs, and a $3,260 per capita GDP."1

market history shows that when there's economic blue sky, future returns are low, and when the economy is on the skids, future returns are high;

Another reason for the spread of the script may simply have been the commercial vitality of the Aramaeans, who were to the deserts of the northern Levantine region what the Phoenicians were to the sea, trading particularly in copper, ivory, incense, and textiles of all descriptions. Whatever the reason, with each change of political dominance, from Assyrian to Babylonian, and from Babylonian to Persian, Aramaic only became more prominent.

Una acción o bono sólo vale el ingreso que produzca en el futuro.

The forces that drove Britain and the United States to control the world's shipping lanes in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, respectively, first saw light of day in Greece's need to feed itself with imported wheat and barley.

The concept that all useful information has already been factored into a stock's price, and that analysis is futile, is known as 'The Efficient Market Hypothesis' (EMH).

This combination of papyrus and a vowel-and-consonant alphabet allowed, for the first time in human history, the potential for mass literacy.

In the words of classicist Jennifer Wise, "With little exaggeration, it could be said that the entirety of the Odyssey ultimately boils down to one simple technological problem: the epic hero's inability to write home."35

Humans abstract and record information in five major ways: with writing, mathematical notation, painting/photography/videography, maps, and clocks—that is, we can abstract and record verbal, numerical, visual, spatial, and temporal information.

Genghis Khan roared out of the steppes to conquer all of central Asia; within a few decades, the Great Khan's descendants ruled over a group of empires comprising more territory than any dynasty before or since.

The advent of the written word around 3300 BC lifted history's curtain and revealed an already well-established pattern of long-distance trade, not only in luxury and strategic goods, but in bulk staples such as grain and timber as well.

The five major domestic asset classes you should use are: large market, small market, large value, small value, REITs.

In the early fifth century BC, a roll of papyrus, consisting of about twenty sheets, cost between one and three drachmas—that is, one to three days' wages for a semiskilled worker.

It is precisely Battuta's lack of interest in peoples outside Dar-al- Islam—the world of Islam—that testifies to Muslim dominance of medieval Asian trade. In the fourteenth century, Battuta could travel 74,000 miles through Morocco, East Africa, India, central Asia, Southeast Asia, and China and remain entirely within the Muslim cultural envelope, never having to interact in a meaningful manner with those outside it in order to survive, to travel, or even to make a living.

Schmandt-Besserat contends that the first writing system—the familiar Sumerian cuneiform script—evolved in this way directly from the token system.13

Schmandt-Besserat's work caused a stir mainly because it seemed to contradict the "pictographic theory," that writing evolved directly from pictures—a theory that is still taught to schoolchildren. Her "token hypothesis" was so bold and so different from the pictographic theory that it could not help but evoke controversy.14

The older pictographic theory still has some virtues. First proposed by William Warburton, an Anglican cleric who eventually became bishop of Gloucester and who wrote in the 1730s, it was, and probably remains, the most commonly accepted theory about the origins of writing.