That strategy of buy and hold, which is the sound and sensible one for the individual, can have very dangerous and perverse effects for the market as a whole.

Mutual funds have historically offered safety and diversification. And they spare you the responsibility of picking individual stocks.

One of the very nice things about investing in the stock market is that you learn about all different aspects of the economy. It's your window into a very large world.

I'm a biographer; I can live with a little hyperbole.

There is no country in the world where it's as easy to find venture capital in the stock market as the United States.

There is a kind of fear, approaching a panic, that's spreading through the Baby Boom Generation, which has suddenly discovered that it will have to provide for its own retirement.

I don't think that a mutual fund that invests exclusively in biotech start-ups or invests exclusively in companies in Thailand offers any great safety or diversification.

I have developed a very strong partiality for the dead: they don't talk back, they don't sue, and they don't have angry relatives.

The securities laws of the 1930s were so important because it forced companies to file registration statements and issue prospectuses, and it remedied the imbalance of information.

Early on, New York already had a national and even international identity.

Hamilton had one of those extraordinary 18th-century minds that touched on virtually every major topic of the day.

The greater the fruit a trees bears, the greater the number of stones thrown at it.

You'll notice that pain isn't solid or constant but rather a series of sensations, sometimes hard, sometimes light, and even sometimes gone altogether

Memory is deceptive because it is colored by today's events

Hope is the second soul of the unhappy.

Bute coming over here is a big mistake.

I remind myself that no one day of writing matters all that much. A story is built somewhat like a stalactite - one little drip of mud and grit at a time.

Maybe that's what is means to be human . . . forever questioning our certainties.

The vice presidential candidate tends to be a bit of an afterthought.

Left-wingers are incapable of conspiring because they are all egomaniacs.

I graduated in 2009, which - if you think back to where the economy was at that time - was an interesting time to graduate.