Quotes About Investment

The more money one has, the less he values each additional increment, or, equivalently, that the utility of any additional dollar diminishes with an increase in capital.

Whatever that guy is buying, I want to short it.

Fear and, to a lesser extent, greed are what make money move.

For though there was no chance of persuading a pension fund manager looking to make a longer-term loan to buy a Freddie Mac bond that could evaporate tomorrow, one could easily sell him the third tranche of a CMO.

No longer were the prices of ordinary mortgage bonds allowed to roam inefficiently, for they were now linked to the CMO market, in much the same way that flour is linked to the market for bread. Fair value for CMOs (the finished product) implied a fair value for conventional mortgage bonds (the raw materials).

My Lehman interview was representative not just of my own experience, but of thousands of interviews conducted by a dozen investment banks on several dozen college campuses from about 1981 onwards.

No trader or investor wanted to poke around suburbs to find out whether the homeowner to whom he had just lent money was creditworthy. For the home mortgage to become a bond it had to be depersonalised. At

Could Morgan Stanley please wire $1.2 billion to Deutsche Bank by the end of the day?

They were combing the markets for bets whose true odds were 10:1, priced as if the odds were 100:1.

A new trader could leap into a market and trade frantically inside it without adding anything of value to it.

From the point of view of American culture, the trouble with disease prevention was that there was no money in it. She needed to find a way to make it pay.

You didn't need to raise millions to build your product and in the process whittle your stake down to almost nothing. You found the concept, you wrote the software to exploit the concept, you sold the company to the public.

Once you were let into the Great Society of Sand Hill Road, you were given first crack at these miraculous enterprises at a small fraction of the cost to Wall Street investment bankers—never mind the general investing public.

He now sat on a billion dollars of Netscape shares and could do whatever the hell he pleased with them. And what pleased him was to put it at great risk.

They sprinkled their money around a lot of different companies and counted on the law of averages to take care of the rest. Clark took a different approach.

The VCs could tolerate companies' going bust—they had so many of them—but they could not tolerate missing out on the new new thing.

I recall that one of the first investment bankers I met taught me a poem. God gave you eyes, plagiarize. A

As the U.S. stock market had grown less comprehensible, it had also become more sensationally erratic.

the bond market, because Wall Street was now making even bigger money packaging and selling and shuffling around America's growing debts.

The bitterness of Poor Quality remains long after the sweetness of Low Price is Forgotten. From Hemingway Adventure by Michael Palin.

The first law of the market is to make the largest possible profit from other people's labor. Private profitability rather than human need is the determining condition of private investment. There prevails a rational systematization of human endeavor in pursuit of a socially irrational end: "accumulate, accumulate, accumulate.

Tree planting is always a utopian enterprise, it seems to me, a wager on a future the planter doesn't necessarily expect to witness.

The bubble logic driving tulipomania has since acquired a name: "the greater fool theory." Although by any conventional measure it is folly to pay thousands for a tulip bulb (or for that matter an Internet stock), as long as there is an even greater fool out there willing to pay even more, doing so is the most logical thing in the world.

The beauty of having an LLC in today's world is No. 1, you have the ability to act and react as nimbly as need be to create change, and you have the ability to invest politically, in the for-profit sector and the nonprofit sector simultaneously.