Market timing, by the way, is a tag some buy-and-hold investors use to put down anything that involves using your brain. These are the same people who like to watch the locomotive coming and get run down in the name of discipline.

As a professional, you can afford to pick some stocks and be wrong about a few of them. To keep your job, you cannot take the risk of being seen to be wrong about the 'big picture' for very long.

Capitalism does millions of things better than the alternatives. It balances supply and demand in an elegant way that central planning has never come close to.

I like to be right. I try not to miss the big ideas, forget the little ones, and try to get them right. End of job description.

One of the main reasons that the landscape of financial stuff in America is different is that gambling is illegal there. So there's a kind of sport-like aspect to the American coverage of finance.

I hope to goodness I would not still be working in the corporate world - the money is OK but it is no life at all.

Money doesn't make you happy - I know people in the U.K. with money, they never seem to be happy.

We have a choice: we can allow the growing disparity between rich and poor to continue unimpeded, or we can take action to budget responsibly and strengthen and expand the middle class. If we want this economy - and this country - to meet its full potential, the choice is simple.