STREET DOGS

In investing, what is comfortable is rarely what is profitable. — Robert Arnott What’s that I hear? The return on those investments is lousy? You’re right. You said you wanted a safe investment. You didn’t say you wanted an investment with a high return.

Alaska is huge and doesn’t have many roads. As a consequence, the largest state in the union has a small army of what they call bush pilots, flying people and stuff to all manner of remote locations, in almost all weather conditions.

Alaska is notorious for some pretty bad weather … not a pilot’s friend.

They have a saying in Alaska: there are old pilots and there are bold pilots, but there are no old, bold pilots.

The same is true of investments. There are safe investments and there are highyielding investments, but there are no safe, high-yielding investments. If there were, people a lot smarter and richer than us would have sniffed them out. — William Cowie

For some reason, many people still haven’t made peace with the notion that investing isn’t optional.

What it comes down to is that people think you have to have a lot of money to invest or play with or that you have to be a Warren Buffett … when people think of investing, it seems like they are thinking of speculation, of getting rich quick, but smart investing [means] buying a tiny bit of an index fund or exchange-traded fund every month for 20 or 30 years. — Anon

Only about one in five attempts to beat the market over time will succeed. This doesn’t just apply to individual investors. This applies to mutual funds. It applies to investment advisers. It applies to portfolio managers. And knowing these odds is the first step towards acquiring investment wisdom. — Mark Hulbert.