Investing

Investing

All people are most credulous when they are most happy.
Walter Bagehot, financial writer and early editor of The Economist

Diversify by owning every stock in the market. By doing so, you eliminate three of the four risks of investing — individual stock risk, style risk, and manager risk. Market risk remains, but this can be tempered by holding each stock forever.
John C. Bogle, founder of Vanguard Funds

The precise moment at which a great belief is doomed is easily recognizable; it is the moment when its value begins to be called into question. Every general belief being little else than fiction, it can only survive on the condition that is be not be subjected to examination... Finally, when the belief has completely lost its force, all that rested upon it is soon involved in ruin.
Gustave le Bon

Markets often give investors what they least expect and most deserve.
Bill Bonner

Wall Street is doing nothing evil; it is merely doing its job — separating fools from their money.
Bill Bonner, "The Wall Street Fandango", in The Daily Reckoning, 2005-5-6

Markets are neither kind nor forgiving. If markets do the work of God, as has been suggested, it is the God of the Old Testament not the New.
Bill Bonner and Addison Wiggin, Financial Reckoning Day: Surviving the Soft Depression of the 21st Century, page 6.

Try to relax and enjoy the crisis.
Ashleigh Brilliant

Price is what you pay. Value is what you get.
Warren Buffett

The recession uncovers what the auditors missed.
Warren Buffett

The market is very efficient at transferring assets from the impatient investor to the patient investor.
Warren Buffett

Early and provident fear is the mother of safety.
Edmund Burke

The first man gets the oyster, the second man gets the shell.
Andrew Carnegie

The history of the stock market is the history of forgetting.
F.J. Chu, The Mind of the Market

Beware the vividness of transient events.
von Clausewitz

To make a small fortune, invest a large fortune.
Bruce Cohn, quoted in The San Francisco Examiner, 1986-6-1

The media pumps, Wall Street dumps and the lumps get humped.
Tom Dyson, The Daily Reckoning, 2004-8-20

The first principle is that you must not fool yourself — and you are the easiest to fool.
Richard Feynman

Get there first with the most.
Nathan Bedford Forrest, Confederate cavalryman

The speculative episode always ends not with a whimper but with a bang... The euphoric episode is protected and sustained by the will of those who are involved, in order to justify the circumstances that are making them rich. And it is equally protected by the will to ignore, exorcise, or condemn those who express doubts.
John Kenneth Galbraith, A Short History of Financial Euphoria

Economics is extremely useful as a form of employment for economists.
John Kenneth Galbraith

Buy when everyone else is selling, and hold until everyone else is buying.
J. Paul Getty

There are two kinds of investors — those who make money in the market and those who keep it.
Ben Graham

The primary objective of most money managers is not to make money for the client. It is to keep the client.
James Grant

Oppressively high is the psychological burden of not being part of a popular mass movement.
James Grant

Bad money drives out good money.
Sir Thomas Gresham

Mathematics has given economics rigor, but alas, also mortis.
Robert Heilbroner

Successful investing is anticipating the anticipations of others.
John Maynard Keynes

Markets may not be perfectly efficient, but they're more efficient than I am. Rationally, there's no insight about the market I can have that the market is not going to already have capitalized.
Michael Kinsley, Smart Money, Aug. 1996

Investors confuse decisions with diligence, activity with insight, and a fully invested posture with a worthwhile portfolio.
Seth Klarman, Baupost

The key to making money in stocks is not to get scared out of them.
Peter Lynch

It is a common failing of man not to take account of tempests during fair weather.
Machiavelli

The most dangerous moment in any financial market boom is the one where the suppliers of funds stop paying attention.
Peter Martin

Stability is unstable.
Hyman Minsky

I made all my money by selling too soon.
J. P. Morgan

The most primitive response to risk is risk avoidance.
Joel S. Moskowitz

One quarter of America thinks that buying lottery tickets is a better retirement plan than saving or investing.
The New York Times, 2000-5-14

The US dollar has dropped in value by an estimated 94% (exact values depend upon the benchmark) since the Fed came into being.
Robert Prechter, Conquer the Crash, p. 206

For most of us, the task of beating the market is not difficult; it is the job of beating ourselves that proves to be overwhelming. In this sense, beating ourselves means mastering our emotions and attempting to think independently as well as not being swayed by those around us.
Martin Pring, Spread Trading

The return of your investment is more important than the return on your investment.
Will Rogers

An economist's guess is liable to be as good as anybody else's.
Will Rogers

Follow the course opposite to custom and you will almost always do well.
J. J. Rousseau

It wasn't raining when Noah built the ark.
Howard Ruff, How to Prosper in the Coming Bad Years, 1979

Once men are caught up in an event they cease to be afraid. Only the unknown frightens men.
Count Antoine de Saint-Exupery

"Wall Street," reads the sinister old gag, "is a street with a river at one end and a graveyard at the other." This is striking, but incomplete. It omits the kindergarten in the middle.
Frederick Schwed, Jr., Where Are the Customer's Yachts?
Money is always there, but the pockets change.
Gertrude Stein

Things that cannot go on have a tendency to stop.
Herb Stein, former Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors

Common sense will tell you that the only time you can get something for a small fraction of what it's worth is when other people are despondently selling. So it's been a new theory of mine, the theory of maximum pessimism. If you want to succeed in selecting investments, look for the points of maximum pessimism.
Sir John Templeton, New York Times

To buy when others are despondently selling and sell when others are greedily buying requires the greatest fortitude and pays the greatest reward.
Sir John Templeton

The four most dangerous words in investing are "It's different this time."