Best 781 quotes in «investing quotes» category

Suppose it was demonstrated that one out of twenty alcoholics could learn to become a moderate social drinker. The experienced clinician would answer, 'Even if true, act as if it were false, for you will never identify that one in twenty, and in the attempt five in twenty will be ruined.' Investors should forsake the search for such tiny needles in huge haystacks.

Surprise! The returns reported by mutual funds aren't actually earned by mutual fund investors.

That paper money has some advantages is admitted. But that its abuses also are inevitable and, by breaking up the measure of value, makes a lottery of all private property, cannot be denied.

That's not to say there's no such thing as an overvalued market, but there's no point worrying about it.

Thats one of the challenges of investing in China, is the lack of clarity with respect to tax positions.

The Americans are good about making fancy cars and refrigerators, but that doesn't mean they are any good at making aircraft. They are bluffing. They are excellent at bluffing.

The basic story remains simple and never-ending. Stocks aren't lottery tickets. There's a company attached to every share.

The best kept secret in the investing world: Almost nothing turns out as expected.

The best approach here, if at all possible, is to use supervisory and regulatory methods to restrain undue risk-taking and to make sure the system is resilient in case an asset-price bubble bursts in the future.

The best business returns are usually achieved by companies that are doing something quite similar today to what they were doing five or ten years ago.

The best thing a human being can do is to help another human being know more.

The boom, not the slump, is the right time for austerity at the Treasury.

The biggest threat to advanced economies is that debt will accumulate until the overhang weighs on growth.

[T]he burden of government is not measured by how much it taxes, but by how much it spends.

The business model piece is we're always talking about competing more effectively. If you're starting a company or career you don't want to compete. You want to create a monopoly. We want to invest in a company that has a good plan to create a monopoly.

The chief losses to investors come from the purchase of low-quality securities at times of favorable business conditions.

The cardinal maxim is, that any aid to a present bad Bank is the surest mode of preventing the establishment of a future good Bank.

The concept of a general equilibrium has no relevance to the real world (in other words, classical economics is an exercise in futility).

The cost of performing well in bad times can be relative underperformance in good times.

The considerations upon which expectations of prospective yields are based are partly existing facts which we can assume to be known more or less for certain, and partly future events which can only be forecasted with more or less confidence.

The deeper one delves, the worse things look for actively managed funds.

The current financial crisis calls out for new products and services as well as more, not less, information about what is safe and profitable in the future environment.

The debate can be put in the form of the question: Resolved, that the best of money managers cannot be demonstrated to be able to deliver the goods of superior portfolio-selection performance. Any jury that reviews the evidence, and there is a great deal of relevant evidence, must at least come out with the Scottish verdict: Superior investment performance is unproved.

The definition of a Dark Age is that we no longer remember what we once could do.

The essence of investment management is the management of risks, not the management of returns.

The determining trait of the enterprising (or active, or aggressive) investor is his willingness to devote time and care to the selection of securities that are both sound and more attractive than the average.

The distinction between investment and speculation in common stocks has always been a useful one and its disappearance is cause for concern.

The entire pursuit of value investing requires you to see where the crowd is wrong so that you can profit from their misperceptions.

The expected never happens; it is the unexpected always.

The distribution of the market is fat-tailed relative to the normal distribution... For passive investors, none of this matters, beyond being aware that outlier returns are more common than would be expected if return distributions were normal.

The goal of a successful trader is to make the best trades. Money is secondary.

The fact that people will be full of greed, fear, or folly is predictable. The sequence is not predictable.

The Fed was largely responsible for converting what might have been a garden-variety recession, although perhaps a fairly severe one, into a major catastrophe. Instead of using its powers to offset the depression, it presided over a decline in the quantity of money by one-third from 1929 to 1933 ... Far from the depression being a failure of the free-enterprise system, it was a tragic failure of government.

...the Federal Reserve has the capacity to operate in domestic money markets to maintain interest rates at a level consistent with our economic goals

The first rule (of investing) for me is don't have rules. You find one amazing investment and that's all that matters. If you pick the right body of water, you might not need a boat.

The good news in investing is there are no HR problems. If there are no humans, there are no problems!

The good news is, the stock market is closed and it can't hurt us again until tomorrow.

The growth stock theory of investing requires patience, but is less stressful than trading, generally has less risk, and reduces brokerage commissions and income taxes.

The greatest Enemies of the Equity investor are Expenses and Emotions.

The grim irony of investing, then, is that we investors as a group not only don't get what we pay for, we get precisely what we don't pay for. So if we pay for nothing, we get everything.

The hardest thing to judge is what level of risk is safe.

The idea of investing in the positivity of employees is often low down on companies' priority lists.

The intelligent investor should recognize that market panics can create great prices for good companies and good prices for great companies.

The individual investor should act consistently as an investor and not as a speculator. This means ... that he should be able to justify every purchase he makes and each price he pays by impersonal, objective reasoning that satisfies him that he is getting more than his money's worth for his purchase.

The intelligent investor is a realist who sells to optimists and buys from pessimists.

The intelligent investor shouldn't ignore Mr. Market entirely. Instead, you should do business with him- but only to the extent that it serves your interests.

The intelligent investor gets interested in big growth stocks not when they are at their most popular - but when something goes wrong.

The investor's chief problem - and even his worst enemy - is likely to be himself.

The investor who permits himself to be stampeded or unduly worried by unjustified market declines in his holdings is perversely transforming his basic advantage into a basic disadvantage.

The idea that a bell rings to signal when investors should get into or out of the stock market is simply not credible. After nearly fifty years in this business, I do not know of anybody who has done it successfully and consistently. I don't even know anybody who knows anybody who has done it successfully and consistently. Yet market timing appears to be increasingly embraced by mutual fund investors and the professional managers of fund portfolios alike.