The index fund always gives you the market return.

The stock market is a giant distraction from the business of investing.

We make too much out of past performance, and it's very misleading to investors. It causes them to move money around. They buy a fund that's hot and then it turns cold as all hot funds eventually do. And then they get out. Well, buying at the high and selling at the low isn't going to leave you a satisfied shareholder, right?

The basic idea of retirement income is, to me, to get a check, two checks every month, one from your fixed income and one from equity account. And you want them to grow over time.

The reality of life is, if you have a bagel shop and everybody is pouring into the doughnut shop across the street, if you want to stay in business, you start selling doughnuts.

Eliminate emotion from your investment program.

Wise investors won't try to outsmart the market.

I like Burton Malkiel's 'A Random Walk Down Wall Street.' He comes to the same conclusion that I do - that indexing is the way. My 'Little Book of Common Sense Investing' says pretty much the same thing.

I tend to give to those who have helped me along the road of life: Blair Academy, Princeton University, our church, and several hospitals that got me here in one piece. On the community side, I've always been a big supporter of the United Way.

Glen Weyl is a good friend of mine.

We have moved from treating funds as investment trusts designed to serve their owner-beneficiaries to treating funds as consumer products, designed to attract the largest possible assets. This new approach has ill-served the interests of fund shareholders.

Invest as efficiently as you can, using low-cost funds that can be bought and held for a lifetime.

Working for company X and having a substantial portion of your retirement plan in company X is simply exposing yourself to too much risk, because the company is both your employer and the source of your retirement income. So if something goes wrong, you lose both your job and your retirement plan.

In investing, you get what you don't pay for. Costs matter. So intelligent investors will use low-cost index funds to build a diversified portfolio of stocks and bonds, and they will stay the course. And they won't be foolish enough to think that they can consistently outsmart the market.

If you put nothing away for retirement, I can tell you, to the last penny, how much you will have when you retire: nothing.

In an ideal world, Adam Smith-like, individuals would recognize what they need to do in their own self-interest, and they will make changes happen and look after themselves.

The grim irony of investing is that we investors as a group not only don't get what we pay for, we get precisely what we don't pay for.

I think average investors should not trade a lot. The evidence is overpowering. The more you trade, the less you earn.

My only regret about money is that I don't have more to give away.

Being an entrepreneur is not for the faint of heart. It is a high-risk, high-reward proposition.

I had done some work on index funds in my senior thesis at Princeton in 1951.

New ideas that fly in the face of conventional wisdom of the day are always greeted with doubt and scorn, even fear.

Every winter my wife and I take a week off and go to a resort in Florida.

When a door closes, if you look long enough and hard enough, if you're strong enough, you'll find a window that opens.