Quotes About Finance

Too often, though, investors forget to examine the assumptions behind the models. Beware of geeks bearing formulas.

I made my first investment at age eleven. I was wasting my life up until then.

Buy stocks like you buy your groceries, not like you buy your perfume.

We believe that according the name 'investors' to institutions that trade actively is like calling someone who repeatedly engages in one-night stands a 'romantic.'

In our view,… derivatives are financial weapons of mass destruction, carrying dangers that, while now latent, are potentially lethal.

We've used up a lot of bullets. And we talk about stimulus. But the truth is, we're running a federal deficit that's 9 percent of GDP. That is stimulative as all get out. It's more stimulative than any policy we've followed since World War II.

If a business does well, the stock eventually follows.

Time in the market is better than timing the market.

It's far better to buy a wonderful company at a fair price, than a fair company at a wonderful price.

The only time to buy these is on a day with no 'y' in it.

Rule No. 1 : Never lose money. Rule No. 2 : Never forget Rule No. 1.

When you combine ignorance and leverage, you get some pretty interesting results.

[The] stock market serves as a relocation center at which money is moved from the active to the patient.

I just had plastic surgery: They cut up all my credit cards. Except for my Discover card, which nobody takes.

America, we started to learn about debit cards, credit cards, credit history, credit scores.

A cynic had defined aid as simply the system by which poor white people in rich countries gave money to rich black people in poor countries to put into Swiss bank accounts.

It is a sound principle of finance, and a still sounder principle of government, that those who have the duty of expending the revenue of a country should also be saddled with the responsibility of levying and providing it.

Bankers know that history is inflationary and that money is the last thing a wise man will hoard.

Charge the loss to your mental account of 'general revenue'—you will feel better!

Companies with pronounceable names do better than others for the first week after the stock is issued

Burton Malkiel's wonderful book A Random Walk Down Wall Street.

people tend to be risk averse in the domain of gains and risk seeking in the domain of losses.

Mutual funds are run by highly experienced and hardworking professionals who buy and sell stocks to achieve the best possible results for their clients. Nevertheless, the evidence from more than fifty years of research is conclusive: for a large majority of fund managers, the selection of stocks is more like rolling dice than like playing poker. Typically at least two out of every three mutual funds underperform the overall market in any given year.

Social psychology comes into the picture here, because the answer that a truthful CFO would offer is plainly ridiculous. A CFO who informs his colleagues that "there is a good chance that the S&P returns will be between –10% and +30%" can expect to be laughed out of the room. The wide confidence interval is a confession of ignorance, which is not socially acceptable for someone who is paid to be knowledgeable in financial matters.