John C. Bogle, founder of the Vanguard Group, on investing.
I came into this business when I was at Princeton, and I worked for a brokerage firm, in the summer, and one of the old runners said, "Bogle, I'm gonna tell you everything you need to know if you're going into the investment business," and I said, "What's that Raymond?" and he said, "Nobody knows nothing." And that's true, we don't know what the future holds, we guess, we look at the past, sometimes it misleads us, sometimes it leads us correctly, but we can't tell the two apart; and the markets are very hard to deal with, because we have all these opinions out there and we've gotta say "I'm smarter than everybody else," and that ...