Most people need insurance. Those with family obligations are downright negligent if they don’t purchase insurance. We risk death every time we get i… - Burton Malkiel

Remember Murphy’s Law: What can go wrong will go wrong. And don’t forget O’Toole’s commentary: Murphy was an optimist. Bad things do happen to good people. Life is a risky proposition, and unexpected financial needs occur in everyone’s lifetime. The boiler tends to blow up just at the time that your family incurs whopping medical expenses. A job layoff happens just after your son has totaled the family car. That’s why every family needs a cash reserve as well as adequate insurance to cope with the catastrophes of life.

Fraud aside, we should have known better. We should have known that investments in transforming technologies have often proved unrewarding for investors. In the 1850s, the railroad was widely expected to greatly increase the efficiency of communications and commerce. It certainly did so, but it did not justify the prices of railroad stocks, which rose to enormous speculative heights before collapsing in August 1857. A century later, airlines and television manufacturers transformed our country, but most of the early investors lost their shirts. The key to investing is not how much an industry will affect society or even how much it will grow, but rather its ability to make and sustain profits. And history tells us that eventually all excessively exuberant markets succumb to the laws of gravity. The consistent losers in the market, from my personal experience, are those who are unable to resist being swept up in some kind of tulip-bulb craze. It is not hard, really, to make money in the market. As we shall see later, an investor who simply buys and holds a broad-based portfolio of stocks can make reasonably generous long-run returns. What is hard to avoid is the alluring temptation to throw your money away on short, get-rich-quick speculative binges.

A random walk is one in which future steps or directions cannot be predicted on the basis of past history. When the term is applied to the stock market, it means that short-run changes in stock prices are unpredictable. Investment advisory services, earnings forecasts, and chart patterns are useless. On Wall Street, the term “random walk” is an obscenity. It is an epithet coined by the academic world and hurled insultingly at the professional soothsayers. Taken to its logical extreme, it means that a blindfolded monkey throwing darts at the stock listings could select a portfolio that would do as well as one selected by the experts.