Quotes About Risk

What is the purpose of living if there are no perils to be encountered and overcome?

The sillier the market's behavior, the greater the opportunity for the businesslike investor.

FOR LONG-TERM DREAMS (FOUR TO TEN YEARS) Once you get to dreams that are going to take you more than four years to save for, you should really consider putting your dream-basket money into growth-oriented investments. Because you've got more time, you can afford to take more risk to get a bigger return. To my mind, that means investing in stock-based mutual funds.

She apparently didn't expect any trouble but she also never expected everything to go perfectly either. That was a good rule to live by Robie knew. Because perfection was rarely the case in the field.

Planning something never seems risky. It's in the execution where all the risk comes." "And

knew there were guys inside waiting to kill you. He held the phone in front of the reader

time in the equation. They had a lot to lose.

Farming was a risky proposition under even the best of circumstances. Folks who toiled in the dirt could do everything right and a drought or an early freeze could come and wipe them out.

But he was also scared, because you did not go into his line of work, or at least survive very long in it, without a commonsensical understanding of your own mortality.

If the calculus is much like a cathedral, its construction the work of centuries, it remained until the nineteenth century a cathedral suspiciously suspended in midair, the thing simply hanging there, with no one absolutely convinced that one day the gorgeous and elaborate structure would not come crashing down and fracture in a thousand pieces.

We all want to break our orbits, float like a satellite gone wild in space, run the risk of disintegration. We all want to take our lives in our own hands and hurl them out among the stars.

We can be heroes just for one day. - Heroes

He Said. David, you must remember that in all the functions we have in life, art is the one place where we can crash our plane and walk away from it. And that's so right. Creating something is the one area where you mustn't have caution or inhibition. If you make a startling, disastrous mess, it's fine, because you can reach out and reevaluate and plunge off into another direction. Bowie on Eno and art Interview Magazine September 1995

I don't know where I'm going from here, but I promise it won't be boring.

Look. Studies show FEAR sets attitudes/tolerance to change. Fearful people reject foreign, alien, strange. Circle wagons. Pull in horizons. Horizons of time. Of tolerance. Of risk. Of Dreams.

An organization that is adept at constantly evolving usually won't need to take enormous risks to bring about revolutionary change, because it'll have been changing all along.

Bob Rubin's book In an Uncertain World. Rubin had argued that many outcomes are possible in a given situation, and you have to anticipate and prepare for eventualities that seem unlikely but that could prove extremely damaging should they materialize

Market participants willing to accept illiquidity achieve a significant edge in seeking high risk-adjusted returns. Because market players routinely overpay for liquidity, serious investors benefit by avoiding overpriced liquid securities and by embracing less liquid alternatives.

Most asset classes contain investment vehicles exhibiting some degree of agency risk, with corporate bonds representing an extreme case. Structural issues render corporate bonds hopelessly flawed as a portfolio alternative. Shareholder interests, with which company management generally identifies, diverge so dramatically from the goals of bondholders that lenders to companies must expect to end up on the wrong side of nearly every conflict.

For periods of one to two years or less, investors ought to favor bank deposits, money-market funds or short-term bond funds.

Sensible investors take great care to minimize the tax bill associated with moving assets from the high-risk, long-term portfolio to the low-risk, short-term portfolio. Although the tax code introduces many complexities to investment decision making, as a starting point consider moving taxable long-term assets to the low-risk portfolio, thereby allowing tax-deferred holdings to continue to receive shelter from taxes.

Sensible investors avoid corporate debt, because credit risk and callability undermine the ability of fixed-income holdings to provide portfolio protection in times of financial or economic disruption.

Asset-backed securities involve a high degree of financial engineering. As a general rule of thumb, the more complexity that exists in a Wall Street creation, the faster and farther investors should run.

Table 1.2 Markets Occasionally Crush Concentrated Portfolios Source: Ibbotson Associates. Stocks, Bonds, Bills, and Inflation 2004 Yearbook (Chicago: Ibbotson Associates, 2004).