In the end, alchemy, whether it is metallurgical or financial, fails. A base business can not be transformed into a golden business by tricks of accounting or capital structure. The man claiming to be a financial alchemist may become rich. But gullible investors rather than business achievements will usually be the source of his wealth.
If you expect to be a net saver during the next 5 years, should you hope for a higher or lower stock market during that period? Many investors get this one wrong. Even though they are going to be net buyers of stocks for many years to come, they are elated when stock prices rise and depressed when they fall. This reaction makes no sense. 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.
Our marketable equities tell us by their operating results - not by their daily, or even yearly, price quotations - whether our investments are successful. The market may ignore business success for a while, but eventually will confirm it.
It's just that I landed up in a terrific capitalist system. One that pays people who allocate capital extraordinarily well. Intrinsically, I'm not worth as much as somebody who invents something that could improves people's life, or health or whatever.
I mean, Hank Paulson is in there [ Treasury] at the wrong time, probably shouldn't have taken the job. He's a friend of mine. But he knows markets, he knows corporations' work, he knows money, and he's got the interests of the country at heart.
In the 20th century, the United States endured two world wars and other traumatic and expensive military conflicts; the Depression; a dozen or so recessions and financial panics; oil shocks; a flu epidemic; and the resignation of a disgraced president. Yet the Dow rose from 66 to 11,497.
The best way in my view is to just buy a low-cost index fund and keep buying it regularly over time, because you'll be buying into a wonderful industry, which in effect is all of American industry... People ought to sit back and relax and keep accumulating over time.
My rather puritanical view is that any investment manager, whether operating as broker, investment counselor of a trust department, investment company, etc., should be willing to state unequivocally what he is going to attempt to accomplish and how he proposes to measure the extent to which he gets the job done.