Those warnings matter most in the years right before you retire, when there is less time left to recover from a bad decision. His 2017 shareholder letter made the strongest case he could against buying stocks with borrowed money, backed by a table showing Berkshire's own stock falling between 37% and 59% on four separate occasions since 1965. Skip the bet you cannot recover from, keep your money working instead of sitting in cash, stay out of margin and high-interest debt, let a low-cost index fund do the job instead of a high-fee manager, ignore the forecasters, hold through the drops, and protect your own plan before anyone else's.