Quotes About Stock

We never know what the Street is going to do with the funky trading.

A nation, like a tree, does not thrive well till it is engraffed with a foreign stock.

The notion that you have a blind trust but you can tell your trustee when to sell stock in it just doesn't make any sense. It means you have a seeing eye trust and not a blind trust. It's ridiculous.

I eat fish and love bacon. Plus, I don't mind if soups are made with chicken or beef stock, I just don't like eating big pieces of meat.

Stock speculators are always doing that and are always working themselves into frenzies over it. Such a frenzy can cloud one's judgment to a hazardous degree.

December 20, 1999, Juno Online Services unveiled a trailblazing business plan: to lose as much money as possible, on purpose. Juno announced that it would henceforth offer all its retail services for free—no charge for e-mail, no charge for Internet access—and that it would spend millions of dollars more on advertising over the next year. On this declaration of corporate hara-kiri, Juno's stock roared up from $16.375 to $66.75 in two days.6

Lucent's stock, at $51.062 on June 30, 2000, finished 2002 at $1.26—a loss of nearly $190 billion in market value in two-and-a-half years.

can be so dangerous; the more you know going in, the less likely you are to probe a stock for weaknesses. This pernicious form of overconfidence is called "home

Besides a cool name and a hot stock, what did Red Hat's investors get? Over the nine months ending November 30, the company produced $13 million in revenues, on which it ran a net loss of $9 million.13 Red Hat's business was barely bigger than a street-corner delicatessen—and a lot less lucrative. But traders, inflamed by the words "software" and "Internet," drove the total value of Red Hat's shares to $21.3 billion by December 9.

Mutual funds are the ultimate way for a defensive investor to capture the upside of stock ownership without the downside of having to police your own portfolio.

In the previous four quarters, Yahoo! had racked up $433 million in revenues and $34.9 million in net income. So Yahoo!'s stock was now priced at 263 times revenues and 3,264 times earnings. (Remember that a P/E ratio much above 25 made Graham grimace!)5

In our view the search for these would not be worth the investor's effort unless he could hope to add, say, 5% before taxes to the average annual return from the stock portion of his portfolio.

Is the stock market riskier today than two years ago simply because prices are higher? The answer is no." But the answer is yes. It always has been. It always will be.

That's because whenever we are too close to someone or something, we take our beliefs for granted, instead of questioning them as we do when we confront something more remote. The more familiar a stock is, the more likely it is to turn a defensive investor into a lazy one who thinks there's no need to do any homework. Don't let that happen to you.

In late 1998, the stock of a tiny, rarely traded building-maintenance company, Temco Services, nearly tripled in a matter of minutes on record-high volume. Why? In a bizarre form of financial dyslexia, thousands of traders bought Temco after mistaking its ticker symbol, TMCO, for that of Ticketmaster Online (TMCS), an Internet darling whose stock began trading publicly for the first time that day.8 Oscar Wilde joked that a cynic "knows the price of everything, and the value of nothing.

No intelligent investor, no matter how starved for yield, would ever buy a stock for its dividend income alone; the company and its businesses must be solid, and its stock price must be reasonable.

A great company is not a great investment if you pay too much for the stock.

Streisand, the day-trading diva, personified the way people abuse Lynch's teachings. In 1999 she burbled, "We go to Starbucks every day, so I buy Starbucks stock." But the Funny Girl forgot that no matter how much you love those tall skinny lattes, you still have to analyze Starbucks's financial statements and make sure the stock isn't even more overpriced than the coffee.

implied that "at normal levels of the market" the investor should be able to obtain an  initial  dividend  return  of  between  31?2%  and  41?2%  on  his  stock purchases, to which should be added a steady increase in underly- ing value (and in the "normal market price") of a representative

Why do you suppose the brokers on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange always cheer at the sound of the closing bell—no matter what the market did that day? Because whenever you trade, they make money—whether you did or not.

An industrial company's finances are not conservative unless the common stock (at book value) represents at least half of the total capitalization, including all bank debt.3 For a railroad or public utility the figure should be at least 30%.

Many significant stock-price inefficiencies can occur when a company is spun off.

This has been done by masters of the trade and Garcia had taken in every stock situation with amazing powers of retention, but he had not put things together right and had used extraordinary discernment in not adding one single touch of originality.

We found a loophole," he said. "Their systems were programmed in such a way that you didn't have to receive ten books, you only had to order ten books. So we found an obscure book about lichens that they had in their system but was out of stock. We began ordering the one book we wanted and nine copies of the lichen book. They would ship out the book we needed and a note that said, 'Sorry, but we're out of the lichen book.