Quotes About Returns

The very necessity of bringing our armament up to a certain level as rapidly as possible must place in the foreground the idea of as large returns as possible in foreign exchange and therewith the greatest possible assurance of raw material supplies, through exporting.

No matter where you are on the political spectrum, libraries make sense. It's such a small investment. Every dollar supporting a library system returns five dollars to the community.

Lusts are like agues; the fit is not always on, and yet the man is not rid of his disease; and some men's lusts, like some agues, have not such quick returns as others.

A borrower who doesn't returns is a beggar.

Kahn's answer: "Investing is about preserving more than anything. That must be your first thought, not looking for large gains. If you achieve only reasonable returns and suffer minimal losses, you will become a wealthy man and will surpass any gambler friends you may have. This is also a good way to cure your sleeping problems.

market history shows that when there's economic blue sky, future returns are low, and when the economy is on the skids, future returns are high;

the most profitable thing we can learn from the history of booms and busts is that at times of great optimism, future returns are lowest; when things look bleakest, future returns are highest. Since risk and return are just different sides of the same coin, it cannot be any other way.

If done properly, successful investing entertains as much as watching clothes tumble in the dryer window. Always remember that the more exciting a given stock or asset class is, the more likely it is to be over-owned, overpriced, and destined for low future returns.

Paradoxically, in the long run, bonds are at least as risky as stocks. This is because stock returns are "mean reverting." That is, a series of bad years is likely to be followed by a series of good ones, repairing some of the damage.

Bonds are even worse, since their returns do not mean revert—a series of bad years is likely to be followed by even more bad ones, as happened during the 1970s. This is the point made by Jeremy Siegel in his superb treatise, Stocks For The Long Run. Professor Siegel pointed out that stocks outperformed bonds in only 61% of the years after 1802, but that they bested bonds in 80% of ten-year periods and in 99% of 30-year periods. Looked

Investors cannot earn high returns without occasionally bearing great loss.

Looked at from another perspective, in the 30 years from 1952 to 1981, stocks returned 9.9% and bonds returned only 2.3%, while inflation annualized out at 4.3%. Thus, during this period, the bond investor lost 2% of real value on an annualized basis, while the stock investor made a 5.6% real annualized return. The last fifteen years of that period were years of high inflation, so this is just another way of saying that stocks withstand inflation better than bonds. Short-term

Why the correlation between popular interest and subsequent low returns? Simple: Driving the price of any asset higher requires the entry of new buyers, and when everyone is invested in stocks, real estate, or gold, there's no one left to join the party; the entry of naïve, inexperienced investors usually signals the end.

Note how small stocks have had higher returns than larger stocks, but that they also have higher risks. In both the Great Depression and the 1970s bear market, small-stocks sustained higher losses than large stocks. In addition, the small stock advantage is extremely tenuous—it's less than a percent-and-a-half per year, and there have been periods of more than 30 years when large stocks have bested small stocks. For these reasons, the small-stock advantage is controversial.

Thus, the logic of the market suggests that: Good companies are generally bad stocks, and bad companies are generally good stocks. Is this actually true? Resoundingly, yes. There have been a large number of studies of the growth-versus-value question in many nations over long periods of time. They all show the same thing: unglamorous, unsafe value stocks with poor earnings have higher returns than glamorous growth stocks with good earnings. Probably

Always favor expected returns calculated from the Gordon Equation over past returns, no matter how long of a period they cover.

By this point, I hope you're moving your lips to this familiar mantra: because risk is high, prices are low. And because prices are low, future returns are high. So

At one time or another, most of us have seen a plot of capital wealth looking something like Figure 1-1, demonstrating that $1 invested in the U.S. stock market in 1790 would have grown to more than $23 million by the year 2000. Unfortunately

Do not trust historical data—especially recent data—to estimate the future returns of stocks and bonds. Instead, rely on interest and dividend payouts and their growth/failure rates.

shareholders will only fund the significant investments companies must make in R&D, process improvement, and culture if they see adequate short-term returns on their investments. It's incumbent on leaders to pursue growth and deliver quarterly results.

In fact, wealth-maximizing individuals compare the after-tax costs of debt with the after-tax returns from bonds, liquidating bond positions to pay off loans when the costs of debt exceed the returns from bonds. Rational investors consider liability positions when making asset allocations.

most important distinction in the investment world does not separate individuals and institutions; the most important distinction divides those investors with the ability to make high quality active management decisions from those investors without active management expertise. Few institutions and even fewer individuals exhibit the ability and commit the resources to produce risk-adjusted excess returns.

Given the difficulties in timing markets and the challenges of security selection, such behavior provides a rational foundation for investment management. By avoiding extreme allocation shifts and holding diversified portfolios, investors cause asset allocation to account for the largest share of portfolio returns.

Happiness pursued eludes, happiness given returns.