Quotes About Investing

You know what term you don't hear anymore? Arbitrage. The markets have gotten too efficient.

You, your employer and your plan's investment managers fail to follow even the most basic rules of investing. You overtrade, chase performance, do not think long term. All of you - All Of You - have done a horrible job managing your retirement plans.

The proposition is that prices reflect all available information, which in simple terms means since prices reflect all available information, there's no way to beat the market.

The historical data support one conclusion with unusual force: To invest with success, you must be a long-term investor.

Wide diversification is only required when investors do not understand what they are doing.

You can make money two ways - make more, or spend less.

Only buy something that you'd be perfectly happy to hold if the market shut down for 10 years.

Finding good partners is the key to success in anything: in business, in marriage and, especially, in investing.

Your success in investing will depend in part on your character and guts, and in part on your ability to realize at the height of ebullience and the depth of despair alike that this too shall pass.

You don't need to be a rocket scientist. Investing is not a game where the guy with the 160 IQ beats the guy with 130 IQ.

This market right now is moving on nothing more than emotions. Guess what? It almost always moves on emotions.

The most important attribute for success in value investing is patience, patience, and more patience. The majority of investors do not possess this characteristic.

if you were to start investing your attention and energy into the unknown, your body would then be able to follow your mind into the unknown—a new experience in your future.

Choosing individual stocks without any idea of what you're looking for is like running through a dynamite factory with a burning match. You may live, but you're still an idiot.

So one way to create an attractive risk/reward situation is to limit downside risk severely by investing in situations that have a large margin of safety. The upside, while still difficult to quantify, will usually take care of itself. In other words, look down, not up, when making your initial investment decision. If you don't lose money, most of the remaining alternatives are good ones.

if you just stick to buying good companies (ones that have a high return on capital) and to buying those companies only at bargain prices (at prices that give you a high earnings yield), you can end up systematically buying many of the good companies that crazy Mr. Market has decided to literally give away.

Somehow, when ownership interests are divided into shares that bounce around with Mr. Market's moods, individuals and professionals start to think about and measure risk in strange ways. When short-term thinking and overly complicated statistics get involved, owning many companies that you know very little about starts to sound safer than owning stakes in five to eight companies that have good businesses, predictable futures, and bargain prices.

Stock prices move around wildly over very short periods of time. This does not mean that the values of the underlying companies have changed very much during that same period. In effect, the stock market acts very much like a crazy guy named Mr. Market.

Although over the short term, Mr. Market may set stock prices based on emotion, over the long term, it is the value of the company that becomes most important to Mr. Market.

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Stock prices move around wildly over very short periods of time. This does not mean that the values of the underlying companies have changed very much during that same period.

After more than 25 years of investing professionally and after 9 years of teaching at an Ivy League business school, I am convinced of at least two things: 1. If you really want to "beat the market," most professionals and academics can't help you, and 2. That leaves only one real alternative: You must do it yourself.

Over the short term, Mr. Market acts like a wildly emotional guy who can buy or sell stocks at depressed or inflated prices. • Over the long run, it's a completely different story: Mr. Market gets it right.

Although over the short term Mr. Market may price stocks based on emotion, over the long term Mr. Market prices stocks based on their value.