Best Advice

Tap the power of compounding

Robert Frank. Professor of management and economics, Cornell University; author, "The Economic Naturalist"

Frank says his grade school teacher asked the class to imagine that we put one paramecium on one square of a checkerboard and then it had two daughters that occupied the second square, and the two daughters each had two daughters who occupied the third square and so on. How many would you have by the time you got to the 64th square?

A lot. If you lined up all the paramecia end to end, they would reach the sun and back 6,000 times over. That lesson easily translated into money. A small amount of money invested to days will be a lot of money in 50 years.

You can't fight the market, so join it

Laurence B. Siegel. Director of research, the Ford Foundation

In the 1970s when Siegel got his M.B.A. everyone was teaching the efficient-market hypothesis: the theory that it's impossible to outperform the market regularly because existing prices reflect all the information that's presently known about an asset. If you outperform, it's generally because of luck.