Quotes About Investors

The mandate that I got from my investors is to invest. So far, we are on the right track, and it is the right formula to invest in Indonesia.

The lower spreads mean lower costs for investors, because Nasdaq investors generally do not trade directly with one another. Instead, they usually buy and sell from market-makers, brokerage firms that flip shares between buyers and sellers and keep the spread for themselves.

Main Street investors, who cannot trade credit default swaps, should not be tempted to trade an instrument with the same risk profile simply because it has been given a different name.

Publicly traded United States companies report sales and profits to investors every quarter.

On the New York Stock Exchange, all buy and sell orders are routed through a single 'specialist,' guaranteeing that most small trades can be matched directly. But most larger trades are delivered to the specialist on the floor of the exchange by human brokers, a system that big investors view as increasingly inefficient.

Stock exchanges say that more than half of all trades are now executed by just a handful of high-frequency traders, who use rapid-fire computers to essentially force slower investors to give up profits, then disappear before anyone knows what happened.

The United States has the most sophisticated financial markets in the world, which does not leave much room to maneuver. But it also offers investors the greatest access to information and the ability to execute trades quickly and efficiently. So it is a mixed bag of opportunity.

Strong credit markets give companies borrowing options to boost their stock prices while making bearish investors scramble to close out trades before losing any more money, both of which then push the stock market even higher and continue the self-reinforcing bullish cycle.

Traditionally, companies have made major announcements before or after the close of trading so that all interested investors and analysts are apprised of the news before trading resumes in their stocks.

Today's consumers are eager to become loyal fans of companies that respect purposeful capitalism. They are not opposed to companies making a profit indeed, they may even be investors in these companies - but at the core, they want more empathic, enlightened corporations that seek a balance between profit and purpose.

Through their own actions, customers can hold companies responsible to higher standards of social responsibility. Through collective action, they can leverage their dollars to combat the force of those investors who myopically pursue profits at the expense of the rest of society.

Since the profits that companies can earn are finite, the price that investors should be willing to pay for stocks must also be finite.

Likewise, investors were delighted to earn 11% on bank certificates of deposit (CDs) in 1980 and are bitterly disappointed to be earning only around 2% in 2003—even though they were losing money after inflation back then but are keeping up with inflation now.

A recent article in the Financial Analysts Journal confirmed what other studies (and the sad experience of many investors) have shown: that the fastest-growing companies tend to overheat and flame out.

While it seems easy to foresee which industry will grow the fastest, that foresight has no real value if most other investors are already expecting the same thing.

I have little confidence even in the ability of analysts, let alone untrained investors, to select common stocks that will give better than average results. Consequently, I feel that the standard portfolio should be to duplicate, more or less, the DJIA.

Today's investors have forgotten Graham's message. They put most of their effort into buying a stock, a little into selling it - but none into owning it. Certainly, Graham reminds us, there is just as much reason to exercise care and judgment in being as in becoming a stockholder.

investors are constitutionally averse to buying into a troubled situation.

Besides a cool name and a hot stock, what did Red Hat's investors get? Over the nine months ending November 30, the company produced $13 million in revenues, on which it ran a net loss of $9 million.13 Red Hat's business was barely bigger than a street-corner delicatessen—and a lot less lucrative. But traders, inflamed by the words "software" and "Internet," drove the total value of Red Hat's shares to $21.3 billion by December 9.

The longer the bull market lasts the more severely investors will be affected with amnesia; after five years or so, many people no longer believe that bear markets are possible.

Hence the greater part of the impressive market record for that period was based on a change in investors' and speculators' attitudes rather than in underlying corporate values.

However, the risk of paying too high a price for good-quality stocks—while a real one—is not the chief hazard confronting the average buyer of securities. Observation over many years has taught us that the chief losses to investors come from the purchase of low-quality securities at times of favorable business conditions. The purchasers view the current good earnings as equivalent to "earning power" and assume that prosperity is synonymous with safety.

We shall dismiss these with the observation that their work does not concern "investors" as the term is used in this book.

We should advise rather strongly against the initiation of a new dollar-averaging plan at the late 1964 levels, since many investors would not have the stamina to pursue such a scheme if the results soon after initiation should appear highly unfavorable.