The consumption and production of energy is a major component of the global economy.

How are the cabs in your city? In Manhattan, where I work, they are rather awful.

In New York, the former lack of real competition allowed taxis to extract excessive charges, regardless of the poor service.

The way we finance homes in this country is slow, filled with middlemen, who run a nonstandardized evaluation process. This makes financing a home cumbersome and difficult.

There is a shortage of doctors, and the American Medical Association is aiming to keep it that way.

History shows us that people are terrible about guessing what is going to happen - next week, next month, and especially next year.

Have a well-thought financial plan that is not dependent upon correctly guessing what will happen in the future.

It is important for investors to understand what they do and don't know. Learn to recognize that you cannot possibly know what is going to happen in the future, and any investment plan that is dependent on accurately forecasting where markets will be next year is doomed to failure.

Never forget this simple truism: Forecasting is marketing, plain and simple.

The ability to select stocks, manage them over time and know when to sell them is incredibly difficult, even for professional fund managers.

Commissions add up, taxes are a big drag, margin ain't cheap. A good accountant costs money as well. The math on this one is obvious, yet investors often fail to recognize it: Keep your costs low and your turnover lower, and you will win in the end.

When it comes to investing, you are your own worst enemy.

No one knows what the top-performing asset class will be next year. Lacking this prescience, your next-best solution is to own all of the classes and rebalance regularly.

When it comes to investing, there is no such thing as a one-size-fits-all portfolio.

People who work in specialized fields seem to have their own language. Practitioners develop a shorthand to communicate among themselves. The jargon can almost sound like a foreign language.

Based on a lifetime of observations and a few decades in the markets, I understand that societies, beliefs and fashions all move in long arcs of time. We call these arcs several things: cycles, periods, eras.

Secular cycles are the long periods - as long as decades - that come to define each market era. These cycles alternate between long-term bull and bear markets.

The electronics industry expanded rapidly and the seeds for the semiconductor and software revolution were planted. The postwar period also saw the suburbanization of America, the rise of the homeowner, the build-out of the interstate highway system, and the rise of automobile culture. Credit availability expanded dramatically.

Once you research an idea, you begin to develop a perspective. Writing about anything in public, often in real time, has helped fashion my views.

Anyone can make an article longer; the skill is keeping it tight and lean.

A number of bloggers in economics and the financial sector have risen to prominence through the sheer strength of their work. Note it was not their family connections nor ties to Ivy League schools or elite banks, but rather the strength of their research, analysis and writing.

Content is king. When you are asking people to read you several times a day, you better have some fine content.

Any time you speak to people about their posture, you learn about their most recent investment activity. When someone just bought stocks, they tend to be bullish; someone who just sold is bearish.

Mutual fund managers want your money in their funds. They get paid based on assets under management.

Hedge fund managers charge so much more than mutual fund managers; alpha is even harder to come by. They end up selling a variety of things beyond mere outperformance.

TV producers want ratings and are willing to do nearly anything to get them. They gin up artificial conflicts and create an urgency for even the most minor of economic data points.

The data strongly suggest that very good years in the U.S. stock market are followed by more good years.

Forecasting is simply not a strength of the species; we are much better with tools and narrative storytelling.

To know whether stocks are cheap or pricey, we typically look at price-to-earnings ratio. Valuation is a tougher question than many folks realize.

People forget that although we can pinpoint the price, we can only guess at future earnings. The past isn't much help: It simply tells whether a market was pricey or cheap.

Gains in corporate profits depend in large part on accelerating global economic growth.

Investing is about making probabilistic decisions with limited information about an unknowable future. The variables are well known, as are the possible outcomes.

You, your employer and your plan's investment managers fail to follow even the most basic rules of investing. You overtrade, chase performance, do not think long term. All of you - All Of You - have done a horrible job managing your retirement plans.

Active management leads to lots of poor investor behavior. It sends people chasing after whoever has the hot hand at the moment.

Often, investors will discover a manager after he's had a terrific run, usually when he lands on a magazine cover somewhere. Invariably, funds swell up with new investor money just before they revert to their long-term averages.

A well-designed 401(k) plan is an enormous competitive edge when recruiting and retaining employees.

Outcome is simply the final score: Who won the game; what numbers came up in a roll of the dice; how high did a stock go. Outcome is the result, regardless of the method used to achieve it. It is not controllable.

You can blow on the dice all you want, but whether they come up 'seven' is still a function of random luck.

Any Wall Street advertising that does not go into the boring details of methodology is most likely to be pushing past performance.

Indeed, eventually, random outcomes all revert to the mean, meaning that streaks eventually end. Understanding this is a key part of intelligent and rational investing.

Rather than engage in the sort of selective retention that so many investors tend to do and pretend mistakes never happened, I prefer to 'own' them. This allows me to learn from them and, with any luck, avoid making the same errors again.

I have been a member of the Microsoft-bashing society for quite some time.

History is replete with examples of tech firms that were marginalized by new companies and technologies.

I credit Google for having the foresight to identify threats to its main business of selling advertising against search results. The potential loss of market share in the mobile space led them to the Android acquisition.

Most of Google's home technologies have failed to catch on in a major way.

Google's founders have had a good eye for imagining what technologies will be significant in the near future. No one asked Google to develop self-driving cars, but it helped them with street views for Google Maps.

We love a tale of heroes and villains and conflicts requiring a neat resolution.

Salesmen always need something to sell.

Any investment bought via credit always runs the risk of margin calls and, eventually, liquidation.

When you buy anything with lots of leverage, it does not require a whole lot to go wrong to lose it all.