Quotes About Finance

And then, to top off the joke, if that is what it is, there are the people with more income than anyone else who pay less tax than anyone else—that is, those with annual incomes of a million dollars or more who manage to find perfectly legal ways of paying no income tax at all.

In the United States it is comparatively easy to raise tax rates and to introduce tax-avoidance devices, and it is comparatively hard to lower tax rates and to eliminate tax-avoidance devices.

Before about 1800, only two important attempts were made to establish income taxes—one in Florence during the fifteenth century, and the other in France during the eighteenth.

To nations holding large amounts of that particular currency in their reserve vaults, the effects of the devaluation is the same as if the vaults had been burglarized.

You know Chad's definition of the New Poor? People who are too far behind with time-payments on next year's model to make the down-payment on the one for the year after?

The relentless rules of humble arithmetic.

Your index fund should not be your manager's cash cow. It should be your own cash cow.

The simple fact is that selecting a mutual fund that will outpace the stock market over the long term is, using Cervantes' wonderful observation, like "looking for a needle in the haystack." So I offer you Bogle's corollary: "Don't look for the needle in the haystack. Just buy the haystack!

The greatest Enemies of the Equity investor are Expenses and Emotions.

It is simply not worth paying anybody more than 1 percent to manage your money. Above $1 million, you should be paying no more than 0.75 percent, and above $5 million, no more than 0.5 percent. . . . Your adviser should use index/passive stock funds wherever possible. If

Graham's timeless lesson for the intelligent investor, as valid today as when he prescribed it in his first edition, is clear: "the real money in investment will have to be made—as most of it has been made in the past—not out of buying and selling but of owning and holding securities, receiving interest and dividends and increases in value." His

A recent study by Morningstar Mutual Funds—to its credit, one of the few publications that systematically tackles issues like this one—concluded essentially that owning more than four randomly chosen equity funds didn't reduce risk appreciably. Around that number, risk remains fairly constant, all the way out to 30 funds (an unbelievable number!), at which point Morningstar apparently stopped counting.

The TIF is designed to be held for a lifetime.

While illusion (the momentary prices we pay for stocks) often loses touch with reality (the intrinsic values of our corporations), it is reality that rules in the long run.

like sales margins or profits. In the short-term, stock prices

When navigating the financial markets, the long-term investor must keep in mind the four basic dimensions of long-term return — reward, risk, cost and time — and must apply them to every asset class. Never forget that these four dimensions are remarkably interdependent.

Some men wrest a living from those who wrest a living from nature and with their hands; this is called trade. Some men wrest a living from those who wrest a living from those who wrest a living from nature and with their hands; this is called finance.

In the casino, the house always wins. In horse racing, the track always wins. In the Powerball lottery, the state always wins. Investing is no different. In the game of investing, the financial croupiers always win, and investors as a group lose. After the deduction of the costs of investing, beating the stock market is a loser's game.

I've often been cited as an advocate for a similar simple and seemingly rigid asset allocation: your bond position should equal your age, with the remainder in stocks. That asset allocation strategy can serve the needs of many—if not most—investors quite well, but it was never intended to be more than a rule of thumb, a place to begin your thought process.

Veblen called it the price-system. Mills called it the Power Elite. It's probably no more than ninety-nine people who don't know what they are doing. They're involved in high finance. Fascinating form of gambling.

Market failure isn't an intellectual curiosity. In many areas of the economy, such as health care, high technology, and finance, it is endemic.

A dollar saved is a quarter earned.

The movies have got more corporate, they're making fewer movies in general, and those they are making are all $200-$300m tent-pole releases that eat up all the oxygen.

I believe that thrift is essential to well-ordered living.