willingness.................

 

     What's important to recognize is that risk and reward are attached at the hip.  If you cannot deal with uncertainty and volatility, you should expect to earn lower returns.  If you desire higher returns, you need to become comfortable with drawdowns and unexpected events vaporizing a piece of your portfolio on occasion.

     If there's one lesson this book hopes to leave you with, it's that risk cannot be avoided—it's something you have to manage, understand, and ultimately respect. . . .

    The real secret to investing, as it turns out, is no secret at all.  It's the willingness to accept that pain and progress are two sides of the same coin.  It's having the courage to hold when others sell, the humility to admit what you don't control and focus on what you do.

     You don't need to outsmart the market.  You just need to outlast it.

-Ben Carlson,  Risk & Reward

curve balls.....................

 

      This cartoon perfectly encapsulates the conflict that occupies nearly every financial decision you make in life.  The essence of successful investing, retirement planning and life in general is balance.  You have to plan for the future but live in the present.  You have to enjoy the moment but plan for old age.  You have to invest for the long run but survive the short run.  It's difficult to balance enjoying life now and ensuring you have the resources to enjoy life later.

     There is no ideal balance for everyone because we all have different goals, needs, resources, expectations, and desires.  The hardest part about planning for your financial future is the simple fact that you don't know what will happen.  No one has it all figured out because no one knows what various curve balls life is going to throw at them.  So you do the best you can.

-Ben Carlson, Risk & Reward: How to handle market volatility and build long-term wealth

Compounding and the long haul.............

 

     As Charlie Munger once said, "The first rule of compounding: Never interrupt it unnecessarily."

Compounding might be the eighth wonder of the world, but it takes time to morph from a caterpillar into a butterfly. . . .

Compounding in a retirement calculator is neat and tidy.  Compounding in the stock market it messy and lumpy. . . .

     If you want consistency over the long haul, you have to accept lower returns.  And if you want higher returns over the long haul, you have to accept volatility.  You can never truly escape risk; you just change how you accept it.

-Ben Carlson, Risk & Reward

when investing....................

 

. . . lean more heavily on emotional intelligence rather than IQ.   Temperament is more important than brainpower in the markets.

-Ben Carlson

the last laugh..........................

 

You can do and say a lot of things in hindsight, kicking and screaming and what-about-ing til the cows come home. But the returns are the returns and you can’t change that.

-Downtown Josh Brown, as he interviews Ron Baron, an early (and big) investor in Elon Musk

the formula...................

 

At the Sun Valley Conference a number of years ago, Jeff Bezos told the story about asking Warren Buffett for advice on a phone call.  It went like this:

     Bezos:  "If you're the second richest guy in the world and your investment thesis is so simple, why isn't everyone just copying you?"

     Buffett:  "Because no one wants to get rich slow."

     There is no formula for getting rich in a hurry.  It's pure luck or timing.  But there is a formula for building wealth slowly.  You have to live below your means, have a healthy savings rate, regularly invest your money into risk assets and then wait.

-Ben Carlson, Risk & Reward

Interesting................

 

..............Us boomers are now outnumbered by our kids.  Back story is here.

self-hazards.......................

 

      Investing is hard.  You're forced to deal with the constant uncertainty, volatility, fear, greed, and an endless stream of noise.  Your worst enemy in the markets is not the person on the other side of the trade—it's you.

      Doing more, trying harder, making more trades and paying more attention to your portfolio can be hazardous to your wealth.  The most important work you can do as an investor is proper preparation.  And when it is time to act, it will because your plan tells you to, not because of some scary headlines or talking head on financial television forcing your hand.

-Ben Carlson, Risk & Reward

the temperament.....................

 

Investing is not a game where the guy with the 160 IQ beats the guy with the 130 IQ.  Once you have ordinary intelligence, what you need is the temperament to control the urges that get other people into trouble in investing.

-Warren Buffett

It's no secret............................

 

Let me tell you the secret to investing.  

     There is no secret.

Sorry to break it to you, but there is no Holy Grail that guarantees overnight riches in the markets.  There's no confidential stock-picking scheme that will give you all of the upside with none of the downside. . . .

It has to be this way because risk and reward are attached at the hip.  If you want to earn a return on your capital, you must accept risk in some form.  One of the few iron laws of investing is there is no free lunch.

Ben Carlson, from his introduction to Risk & Reward

Predictions are hard................

 

This data is fairly well known. The problem, though, is that trading activity generates revenue for the brokerage industry, so it has an interest in keeping investors engaged with the market. That’s why brokerage analysts are on TV every day, offering their forecasts for individual stocks, for the overall market and for the broader economy. To be sure, this makes for interesting television. The problem, though, is that it’s been shown to carry almost no value. According to research by Joachim Klement, the accuracy of Wall Street prognosticators is approximately zero.

-Adam Grossman, from here

the quest........................

 

     Life is full of experiences—touching and seeing and looking and doing and acting—but you're going to lose the lessons of those experiences if you don't take time to reflect.

     We can all learn to gather up the past and invest in the future.  Gather up today and invest it in tomorrow.  Gather up this week and invest it in the next week.  Gather up this year and invest it in the next year.  Many people simply hang on one more year.  They are just hanging in there, seeing what's going to happen.  I am asking you to choose a different path, to learn, study, and reflect.  This is a major part of personal development: the quest to become better than you are now.

-Jim Rohn

On guessing/investing.............

 

The difference between a good investor and a bad one isn’t access to some hidden truth. It’s the quality of the process. How disciplined is your research? How well do you manage risk when you’re wrong? How honest are you with yourself when a thesis breaks down? Good investors aren’t right more often because they know more. They’re right more often because they’re more rigorous about how they guess, and quicker to admit when they’ve guessed wrong.

-Eric Soda, from this newsletter

Yep...........................

 

The big money is not in the buying and the selling, but in the waiting.

-Charlie Munger

As we've always said, real estate investing is a get-rich-slowly scheme

Buy the coffee...................

 

It's the cliche that refuses to die: Personal finance nag Suze Orman warned investors that if they "waste money on coffee, it's like peeing $1 million down the drain.

     I disagree.  If the difference between success and failure is the cost of a cup of coffee, you have much bigger financial problems.  A daily $5 latte does not amount to much in the grand scheme of life. . . .

     Here is what really gets me annoyed: Orman tells her audience that "Your Daily Coffee Habit is Costing You $1 Million," with this calculation:   Let's say you spent around $100 on coffee each month.  If you were to put that $100 into a Roth IRA instead, after 40 years the money would have grown to around $1 million with a 12% rate of return.

     Nope.  This calculation is nonsense, and worse, it is intellectually dishonest.  The actual real numbers are almost 75% less. . . . So, 12% annual returns for 40 years?  That's 50% better than the markets give you.  I literally have $5 billion for anyone who can get my clients fat 12% returns annually for the next 40 years.

-Barry Ritholtz,  How Not To Invest: The Ideas, Numbers, and Behaviors That Destroy Wealth—And How To Avoid Them

Timeless lessons...............

 

.................shared by Ben Carlson:

Market volatility is an opportunity, not a reason to abandon your investment plan.

Don’t allow fear or greed to dictate your investment stance.

Don’t confuse your investment time horizon with someone else’s.

Don’t give in to FOMO.

Don’t allow recency bias, survivorship bias, hindsight bias, or short-term performance to guide your actions.

Never panic.

Never get too high in a bull market or too low in a bear market. You’re not smarter when the market goes up or dumber when it goes down.

Markets are constantly evolving. Human nature is not. The narratives are driven by price and price movements are fickle.

It’s always the same lessons!

About those free lunches...........

 

Improved confidence in the future is a good thing in and of itself, since it surely promotes greater saving and investment, which ultimately translate into more and better-paying jobs and higher living standards. On the other hand, finding good values in a period of tranquility becomes harder, and the market becomes more susceptible to disappointments. There's no free lunch, but things could certainly be a lot worse than they are today.

-Scott Grannis, from this post

cognitive misers...............

 

Nowhere in the modern world do we see the effects of our emotional behavior more clearly than in markets.  Our emotions lead us to be overconfident when we should be humble, panicked when we should be circumspect, and deeply engaged in seeking information that conforms (rather than disconfirms) our preexisting beliefs. . . .

According to Bernstein, humans are "cognitive misers," relying on simple narratives instead of using complex analytical thinking. The more compelling the narrative is, the more corrosive it becomes to our analytical abilities.

-Barry Ritholz, How Not To Invest: The Ideas, Numbers, and Behaviors That Destroy Wealth—And How to Avoid Them

with keener avarice..........

 

For Emerson as for Thoreau, economy means how to live.  Failure to understand that means missing Emerson's main point.  "The true thrift," he concludes, "is always to spend on the higher plane, to invest and spend, with keener avarice, that he may spend in spiritual creation, and not in augmenting animal existence."

-Robert D. Richardson, Jr.,  Emerson:  The Mind on Fire

Not sure if this is good or bad................

 

Roughly 66% of US households own real estate, and for the typical American homeowner, that property makes up roughly half of their household’s net worth. . . .

The US housing market alone was worth a hefty sum of $55T as of September 2025. For context, the entire US stock market is worth roughly $62.2T.

-as culled from here