Quotes About Investment

Yeah, but just think if we spent that money on early childhood education and nutrition.

And I can sell you the Brooklyn Bridge.

Every time local politicians propose to tax people in order to build a stadium for a billionaire major-league owner, they hold out in their right hand the promise that the increased business activity will more than replace the money spent. But they don't want you to look at the left hand—the jobs and wealth created by the money that people would have spent if it hadn't been taxed away for the stadium. •

If you want to perform well over both the short and long term, pay close attention to executive leadership in general. As much as you might invest in areas like culture, process transformation, and M&A, you'll only make progress if you have talented senior leaders who are both committed to the company's strategies and capable of executing on them. Having the right number of those leaders matters too.

If you have a great strategy but overpay for a company, someone else's shareholders will see the benefits of your strategy, not yours.

Instead of finding new ways to support innovation and investment while achieving short-term goals, they fall back on the same old strategies, policies, and procedures, relying on accounting sleight-of-hand to make it all work.

An inverse relationship exists between efficiency in asset pricing and appropriate degree of active management. Passive management strategies suit highly efficient markets, such as U.S. Treasury bonds, where market returns drive results and active management adds little or nothing. Active management strategies fit inefficient markets, such as private equity, where market returns contribute very little to ultimate results and investment selection provides the fundamental source of return.

investment success requires sticking with positions made uncomfortable by their variance with popular opinion. Casual commitments invite casual reversal, exposing portfolio managers to the damaging whipsaw of buying high and selling low. Only with the confidence created by a strong decision-making process can investors sell mania-induced excess and buy despair-driven value.

Emphasizing inefficiently priced asset classes with interesting active management opportunities increases the odds of investment success. Intelligent acceptance of illiquidity and a value orientation constitute a sensible, conservative approach to portfolio management.

Capital markets provide three tools for investors to employ in generating investment returns: asset allocation, market timing, and security selection.

Establishing a coherent investment program begins with understanding the relative importance of asset allocation, market timing, and security selection.

Awareness of the breadth and seriousness of agency issues constitutes the first line of defense for fund managers. By evaluating each participant involved in investment activities with a skeptical attitude, fiduciaries increase the likelihood of avoiding or mitigating the most serious principal-agent conflicts.

The investor with a long-term horizon begins with a portfolio composed entirely of risky assets. Then, as the investor's investment horizon contracts, the investor moves assets from high-risk to low-risk positions.

Cambridge Associates Annual Analysis of College and University Pool Returns.

On initial investment, investors frequently pay a load, or sales charge, to acquire shares. Loads range up to 8.5 percent, sometimes varying with the size of investment and length of holding period. Funds without sales charges carry the no-load designation.

Three basic investment principles inform asset-allocation decisions in well-constructed portfolios. First, long-term investors build portfolios with a pronounced equity bias. Second, careful investors fashion portfolios with substantial diversification. Third, sensible investors create portfolios with concern for tax considerations. The principles of equity orientation, diversification, and tax sensitivity find support both in common sense and academic theory.

The harsh reality of the negative-sum game dictates that, in aggregate, active managers lose to the market by the amount it costs to play in the form of management fees, trading commissions, and dealer spread. Wall Street's share of the pie defines the amount of performance drag experienced by the would-be market beaters.

Larger portfolios impede investment advisor efforts to manage assets actively

Security selection may provide substantial excess returns to skilled investors, but those excess returns come directly from the pockets of other players who suffer poor relative returns. When aggregating the returns for all actively managed portfolios, the combined results inevitably mimic the market, less a discount equal to the amount paid to play the game. For the investment community as a whole, security selection plays a return-reducing role in investment performance.

Two factors explain the individual's predicament. The first problem stems from the investment choices available to individuals. High costs and poor execution doom the vast majority of offerings. The second problem concerns responses by individuals to markets. Research shortcomings, rearview-mirror investing, and investor fickleness (in the face of both adversity and opportunity) cripple most investment programs.

Investors generally fail to follow the most basic investment precepts. Instead of concentrating on the central issue of creating sensible long-term asset-allocation targets, investors too frequently focus on the unproductive diversions of security selection and market timing. Instead of constructing equity-oriented, well diversified, tax-sensitive portfolios, investors too frequently choose to mimic the conventional, poorly structured consensus

The perpetual nature of colleges and universities makes endowment management one of the investment world's most fascinating endeavors. Balancing the tension between preserving long-run asset purchasing power and providing substantial current operating support provides a rich set of challenges, posing problems unique to endowed educational institutions.

Investment returns stem from decisions regarding three tools of portfolio management: asset allocation, market timing, and security selection.

Investment success requires the conviction that comes from a fundamental understanding of the rationale for building the portfolio to certain specifications. Unless investors truly believe in the efficacy and validity of an unconventional approach to asset management, the end result almost certainly fails to withstand the wear and tear of market forces. Thoughtless