Quotes About Investing

The best way to implement this strategy is indeed simple: Buy a fund that holds this all-market portfolio, and hold it forever. Such a fund is called an index fund. The index fund is simply a basket (portfolio) that holds many, many eggs (stocks) designed to mimic the overall performance of the U.S. stock market (or any financial market or market sector).

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.

I'm at the stage in life where I get a lot of pleasure out of finding a cheap stock.

If you expect to continue to purchase stocks throughout your life, you should welcome price declines as a way to add stocks more cheaply to your portfolio.

Famed value investor Guy Spier has managed to write what is both a gripping memoir and a fascinating study of what it takes to succeed in investing and life. A must read!

One of my great pleasures from the study of investing, finance, and economics is the discovery of insights about people and society. The physical sciences have rules such as the law of gravitation that generally hold true in the world as we know it. But human beings and the way they interact aren't covered by broad, unchanging theories and may never be. Instead I've come across more limited concepts that tie things together and serve as shortcuts to understanding.

As Keynes said, the market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent.

The big three for most investors are equities, interest rate securities, and real estate. Each accounts for about a quarter of the total net worth of US households, though the proportions fluctuate, particularly when an asset class experiences a boom or a bust.

Education has made all the difference for me. Mathematics taught me to reason logically and to understand numbers, tables, charts, and calculations as second nature. Physics, chemistry, astronomy, and biology revealed wonders of the world, and showed me how to build models and theories to describe and to predict. This paid off for me in both gambling and investing.

You can spot, for instance, where the buying is only a trifle better than the selling. A battle goes on in the stock market and the tape is your telescope. You can depend upon it seven out of ten cases.

It never was my thinking that made the big money for me. It always was my sitting. Got that? My sitting tight! It is no trick at all to be right on the market.

I noticed that in advances as well as declines, stock prices were apt to show certain habits, so to speak. There was no end of parallel cases and these made precedents to guide me.

One of the most helpful things that anybody can learn is to give up trying to catch the last eighth—or the first. These two are the most expensive eighths in the world. They

There is a time for all things, but I didn't know it. And that is precisely what beats so many men in Wall Street who are very far from being in the main sucker class. There is the plain fool, who does the wrong thing at all times everywhere, but there is the Wall Street fool, who thinks he must trade all the time. No man can always have adequate reasons for buying or selling stocks daily or sufficient knowledge to make his play an intelligent play.

One of the most helpful things that anybody can learn is to give up trying to catch the last eighth or the first. These two are the most expensive eighths in the world. They have cost stock traders, in the aggregate, enough millions of dollars to build a concrete highway across the continent.

I never want to buy stocks too cheap or too easily.

there is the Wall Street fool, who thinks he must trade all the time. No man can always have adequate reasons for buying or selling stocks daily—or sufficient knowledge to make his play an intelligent play. I proved it.

I trade in accordance to my means and always leave myself an ample margin of safety.

I never buy a stock even in a bull market, if it doesn't act as it ought to act in that kind of market.

Experiences had taught me to beware of buying a stock that refuses to follow the group-leader.

I have found an easy way and I stick to it. I simply cannot help making money. I will tell you my secret if you wish. It is this: I never buy at the bottom and I always sell too soon.

The speculator's deadly enemies are: Ignorance, greed, fear and hope.

Everybody knew that the way to do that was to take profits and buy back your stocks on reactions. And that is precisely what I did, or rather what I tried to do; for I often took profits and waited for a reaction that never came. And I saw my stock go kiting up ten points more and I sitting there with my four-point profit safe in my conservative pocket. They say you never grow poor taking profits. No, you don't. But neither do you grow rich taking a four-point profit in a bull market.