Quotes About Investment

The company's twenty thousand workers are the best paid in the industry, but the company has the lowest labor cost per ton of steel, leads the industry in return on capital, has the lowest financial leverage of any major steel company, and has paid 142 consecutive dividends. Retaining the right people sets up the company to do lots more with less.

Make as many small bets as you have people responsible for making them happen and sufficient financial resources to maximize the odds of success. If there aren't enough resources to give the small bet a chance, you'll never know if it might have worked out or been a possible home run.

In the early days of IBM, when a newly promoted executive lost a lot of money on a bet that went wrong, founder Thomas Watson let everyone know he wasn't going to be fired. "Why would I fire him?" he asked. "We just spent thirty thousand dollars educating him.

When companies haphazardly throw money at what they perceive their problems, challenges, and opportunities to be, the real answers that could solve the real problems or allow them to embrace radical change and take advantage of the real opportunities are seldom found.

Succeeding in stocks comes down to accepting that nobody can know the future, and then adopting an investment system that wins by reacting rather than predicting.

Be fearful when others are greedy, and be greedy when others are fearful.

What a price we pay for experience, when we must sell our youth to buy it.

Mortgages were less about getting people into property than getting them into debt. Someone had to absorb the surplus supply of credit.

Step by step, place became property, property became a mortgage, and mortgages became derivative investments.

Goldman Sachs and other investment banks understood the ensuing problem so well that they began betting against the very mortgage-backed securities they were underwriting!

If you so sparingly, look for sparingly results.

An entrepreneur in debt is an entrepreneur in business.

The ideas in each—from profit-sharing with employees to new approaches to job training, from reform of the financial system to promote long-term time horizons on investment to more progressive taxes and large-scale infrastructure investment—would help create a more just economy.

Financial repression returned to the West after 2008. Short-term rates in the United States and Europe were held below the level of inflation and remained negative in real terms for years on end.

The most encompassing view of interest is contained in the notion of interest as the 'time value of money' or, simply, as the price of time.

It is relatively easy to identify those industries where these conditions exist currently (just look at existing returns on capital), and it is for this reason that the really juicy investment returns are to be found in industries which are evolving to this state. The joy from a capital cycle perspective is that most investors are, for a variety of behavioural reasons, taken by surprise. Across many competitive battlefronts, we are always looking out for the next outbreak of peace.

Back at his beloved Mount Vernon in 1797, Washington threw himself into farming and even became a whiskey distiller. No product ever netted him a larger return on his investment than this potent, rye-based intoxicant that he sold straight from the still. His distillery became the largest in the United States by 1799.

A Wall Street man is greedy, too. No harm in that. Without greed, I always say, there'd be no civilization. But the Wall Street man doesn't have the patience to till the soil or manufacture things. He's clever, but he's not deep. He invests in companies, but he doesn't much care what they are, or what they do. What he wants is to bet on them. Wall Street will always be full of young men, betting.

There is nothing like losing all you have in the world for teaching you what not to do. And when you know what not to do in order not to lose money, you begin to learn what to do in order to win. Did you get that? You begin to learn!

Men who can both be right and sit tight are uncommon. I found it one of the hardest things to learn. But it is only after a stock operator has firmly grasped this that he can make big money. It is literally true that millions come easier to a trader after he knows how to trade than hundreds did in the days of his ignorance.

The reason is that a man may see straight and clearly and yet become impatient or doubtful when the market takes its time about doing as he figured it must do. That is why so many men in Wall Street, who are not at all in the sucker class, not even in the third grade, nevertheless lose money. The market does not beat them. They beat themselves, because though they have brains they cannot sit tight.

A man has to have experience and he has to pay for it.

He must fear that his loss may develop into a much bigger loss, and hope that his profit may become a big profit. It is absolutely wrong to gamble in stocks the way the average man does.

They say you never grow poor taking profits. No, you don't. But neither do you grow rich taking a four-point profit in a bull market.