Economic theory is a mistress of even too tempting grace. - Paul Samuelson

What sex is to the biology classroom, stocks and investment riskiness is to the sophomore economics lecture hall.

Inside every classical economist is a modem economist trying to get out. In rereading the Wealth of Nation is, it seems to me that with a little midwifery sleight of hand, one can extract from Adam Smith a valuable model that vindicates him from criticisms of Ricardo and Marx and from the general supercilious discounting of Smith as an unoriginal theorist who is logically fuzzy and eclectically empty.

What is truly discouraging — or reassuring? — is the considerable evidence that the universe of those who seek to be "timers," and vary the fractional shares of their portfolios committed to common stocks in the hope of enlarging average long-term total return, in fact fail to achieve on the average any plus gain in comparison with simply buying and holding a fixed fraction of common stocks.