The Best Financial Advice I Ever Got (or Gave): Wisdom from 22 successful investors

The holidays are a time for relaxing, helping the less fortunate, showering family and friends with love and attention—and, sometimes, for smiling and nodding through unsolicited stock tips from an overbearing relative who has been sampling the eggnog.

But good advice can make careers and forever change lives for the better. So The Wall Street Journal asked an array of prominent people who manage, invest, study and write about money to share the single best piece of financial advice they ever received—or gave.

The respondents included investors who collectively have earned billions of dollars for clients and themselves; founders and owners of businesses that are household names; and Nobel laureates who shaped the world's understanding of the forces that drive the stock market.

A leading federal judge who has presided over cases related to the financial crisis shared his thoughts, as did an agent who has negotiated some of the most lucrative contracts in the history of sports and an adviser who helps clients recover financially after a divorce.

In most cases, the recommendations are easy to follow today. Some reflect conventional wisdom, while some fly in its face. Not every tidbit is consistent with all the others. The responses, some of which were edited for clarity, appear below.

But first, a word of caution: Like all advice, it should be weighed soberly—ideally, at a good distance from the eggnog.

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Seth Klarman, president of the Baupost Group, a Boston-based hedge fund

Wally Carucci [of brokerage firm Carr Securities], a dear friend who passed away this last year, was an amazing mentor to me 30 years ago. The wisdom he gave to me was "You have to feed the birdies when they're hungry."

There are two ways to interpret that. There's the superficial meaning: Don't forget to sell, and always remember that it's easier to buy than to sell. But what he was really talking about is that liquidity is ephemeral. Wally was best known for his research on very illiquid, thinly traded stocks. What he meant on the deeper level is that when people want to take you out of an asset for a full price, don't hold out for the last dollar.