Limits On Coping

Being too far ahead of your time is indistinguishable from being wrong.

Positioning for cycles isn’t easy. Be careful about betting too heavily on your opinions.

It is difficult to make frequent and correct distinctions about the market when it is in the middle ground between rich and cheap. Detecting and exploiting the extremes is really the best we can hope for.

By making decisions only at the greatest cyclical extremes, you maximize your chances of being right.

You shouldn’t expect to reach profitable conclusions daily, monthly, or even yearly.

When there is nothing clever to do, the mistake lies in trying to be clever.

No one should fear that he is not up to the task just because he is unsure of his conclusions. These are not things about which certainty is attainable.

You need a strong stomach for being wrong because we are all going to be wrong more often than we expect. Being wrong is inevitable and normal.