Quotes About Market

People don't buy lady art.

Art should be for sale. The artist should not.

Iranian oil minister Bijan Zanganeh demanded that the other Gulf countries cut back while Iran regained, as he put it, "our lost share of the market." The Arab Gulf countries were adamant that they would not cut back to make room for additional Iranian oil. "We will provide oil to whoever asks for it," said Prince Abdulaziz bin Salman, Saudi deputy oil minister at the time.

Central planning was just not good at replacing what the great eighteenth-century economist Adam Smith called the "invisible hand" of the market. When the plan was formulated in tons of steel sheet, the sheet was made too heavy. When it was formulated in terms of area of steel sheet, the sheet was made too thin. When the plan for chandeliers was made in tons, they were so heavy, they could hardly hang from ceilings.

Capitalist Prime

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

The fatal conceit of intellectuals, he said, is to think that smart people can design an economy or a society better than the apparently chaotic interactions of millions of people. Such intellectuals fail to realize how much they don't know or how a market makes use of all the localized knowledge each of us possesses.

It behoves the art establishment to elevate them to a higher plateau as fast as possible, to make them unavailable, aesthetically, to a low art market...[The art establishment] extends its parameters to capture the new thing and elevate it from low art to high art—successfully enough to increase the commerce proposition that goes along with it—and to consign the idea of art to a particular world.

Adam Smith saw what had happened to markets and societies for millennia. Winners are never satisfied with success in the latest market battle, with a cool product or financial or political achievement. As humans, we use any recent advantage to ensure that competitors will fail in future struggles.

While at General Electric, I'd noticed firsthand what a big difference it made to be in a good industry. When I ran General Electric's major appliance business, we had a great position but were in a crummy, highly competitive, low-growth industry. No matter how hard we worked, we stood little chance of excelling—the pressure on prices was just too intense. It was far easier, I found, to make progress with a business that occupied a bad position in a good industry.

Regarding a prospective company's position in its industry, think hard about whether you might roll up multiple players in a fragmented industry to create a juggernaut. When we entered the gas detection business, there were no big players, but over an eight-year period we were able to acquire several companies, roll them up into a single Honeywell business, and become number one in the industry.

When it came to monetary compensation, we didn't hesitate to pay our leaders above market.

To attract and retain the very best, we also paid the best people what they would command at other companies for a bigger job. Why wait until someone else tried to steal them away before paying them what the market said they were worth?

The marketplace is not a battlefield where the person with the most money wins the battle and takes the whole prize;

Finance theory teaches that active management of marketable securities constitutes a negative-sum game, as the aggregate of active security-selection efforts must fall short of the passive alternative by the amount of the fees, commissions, and market impact that it costs to play the game.

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

Well-constructed academic studies confirm the theoretical premise. Robert Arnott's 2000 examination of U.S. equity mutual-fund returns shows a twenty-year pre-tax deficit of 2.1 percent per year relative to the result achieved by investors in Vanguard's 500 Index Fund. Nearly 80 percent of actively managed funds failed to reach Vanguard's market-mimicking return.

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

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.

Passive market timing consists of inadvertent deviations from long-term targets caused by the action of market forces on the values of a portfolio's various asset classes. Whether caused by an investor's active decision or an investor's passive indifference, market-timing returns result from deviations between hypothetical target portfolio returns and actual portfolio asset class returns.

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.

Market timing fails to make an important contribution to institutional portfolio results, because investors quite sensibly show reasonable constancy in holdings of various asset types.

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.

Market studies focusing only on returns for securities in the United States miss important information. Recent academic work by Will Goetzmann and Philippe Jorion on investor experience in other countries reduces confidence in the long-run superiority of equity investing.