Pearls of Wisdom

Warren Buffet (Oracle of Omaha): Don't pay too much for any stock. P/E ratio, P/B ratio and ROE are critical indicators for Buffet. We pay for businesses we feel good about owning by tracking management performance and business performance over a long 5 -10 year horizon.
Jim Rogers: He invested in countries! Went against the tide and invested in Lebanon and made a killing. He suggested to carefully listen to media and TV. He suggests tricks to spot tops and bottoms. Tops: trees will keep growing up and up. Bottoms: media declaring 'stocks are dead'. Fortunes can be made by timing these tops and bottoms but it can be done. Note that all large bottoms and tops are alike. Look in history and you will see very similar patterns. At bottoms, many who have been in business for a long time will leave or diversify. At tops, companies with no experience will also crowd in. The key is not to be a market genius but a market observer and thinker.
Peter Lynch (Fidelity): Buy things close to your home. The edge you get from buying companies you know (such as company where you work, who you do daily business with, who your kids love eating at etc) is much higher than even most informed stock market investors. Lynch bought things like Taco Bell, ADP etc. He seemed to stay away from tech stocks. He ran the famous Fidelity Magellan fund.
John Bogle (Vanguard): Active investing is a fool's play. Use market indices to play the market. Use various sector indexes for diversification. Active investing
One more wise guy:
Stock market has ups and downs because investors exhibit irrational exhuberance (Alan Greenspan's term) on the way up and down. That's why if you play a contrarian...when market and everyone is saying up ..up and above, you start selling...when everyone is saying this is the worst market, don't get in ...you start buying. "If you want to be with the crowd, you need to be cautious. If you are going against it, you need to be bold". Learning to analyze market opinion from TV and Newspaper news and then taking an opposite view has worked great for him.
Henry Markovitz : Markets are efficient and every investor should try to buy portfolio on the efficient frontier which is consistent with his risk levels. It pays to follow mean variance optimized (MVO) portfolios.