Quotes About Investing

The right response to a fall in the price of one asset class is never to panic and sell out. Rather, you need the long-term discipline and personal fortitude to buy more. Remember: The lower stock prices go, the better the bargains if you are truly a long-term investor. Sharp market declines may make rebalancing appear a frustrating "way to lose even more money." But in the long run, investors who rebalance their portfolios in a disciplined way are well rewarded.

Rebalancing will not always increase returns. But it will always reduce the riskiness of the portfolio and it will always ensure that your actual allocation stays consistent with the right allocation for your needs and temperament.

There are few, if any, absolute rules in saving and investing, but here's ours: Never, never, never take on credit card debt. This rule comes as close as any to being an inviolable commandment. Scott

As in so many human endeavors, the secrets to success are patience, persistence, and minimizing mistakes. In driving, it's having no serious accidents; in tennis, the key is getting the ball back; and in investing, it's indexing—to avoid the expenses and mistakes that do so much harm to so many investors.

The secret to success and enjoyment in so many parts of life is to know your capabilities and stay within them. Similarly, the key to success in investing is to know yourself and invest within your investing capabilities and within your emotional capacities.

14 A LIFE-CYCLE GUIDE TO INVESTING There are two times in a man's life when he should not speculate: when he can't afford it, and when he can. —Mark Twain, Following the Equator INVESTMENT STRATEGY NEEDS to be keyed to one's life cycle.

We have believed for many years that investors will be much better off bowing to the wisdom of the market and investing in low-cost, broad-based index funds, which simply buy and hold all the stocks in the market as a whole. As more and more evidence accumulates, we have become more convinced than ever of the effectiveness of index funds. Over 10-year periods, broad stock market index funds have regularly outperformed two-thirds or more of the actively managed mutual funds.

The average actively managed mutual fund charges about one percentage point of assets each year for managing the portfolio. It is the expenses charged by professional "active" managers that drag their return well below that of the market as a whole. Low-cost index funds charge only one-tenth as much for portfolio management. Index funds do not need to hire highly paid security analysts to travel around the world in a vain attempt to find "undervalued" securities. In

It is not hard to make money in the market.

The basketball great Kobe Bryant started his own venture-capital firm. LeBron James has rebranded himself as not just an athlete but also an investor and entrepreneur.

Markets go up not because there is abundance of buyers, but because there is a lack of sellers.

As the economist John Maynard Keynes once pointed out, buying stocks is like trying to anticipate who will win a beauty contest. You want to choose not the person who you think is the most beautiful but the person you think everyone else will see as most beautiful. So it is with stocks: prices rise not just when a company turns in great performance but when a lot of investors believe that the future will bring even better performance

Most people think buying is investing, but they're wrong. Buying doesn't make you an investor any more than buying groceries makes you a chef.

Because they study it all the time, they think they are investing—but they're not. Figure

Benjamin Graham, the author of Security Analysis, a classic guide to investing.

Buy into a company because you want to own it, not because you want the stock to go up.... People have been successful investors because they've stuck with successful companies. Sooner or later the market mirrors the business.

Speculation is most dangerous when it looks easiest.

Long ago, Sir Isaac Newton gave us three laws of motion, which were the work of genius. But Sir Isaac's talents didn't extend to investing: He lost a bundle in the South Sea Bubble, explaining later, "I can calculate the movement of the stars, but not the madness of men." If he had not been traumatized by this loss, Sir Isaac might well have gone on to discover the Fourth Law of Motion: For investors as a whole, returns decrease as motion increases.

Protect and preserve your core customers, he [Jim Sinegal, cofounder and CEO of Costco] told our marketing team when I invited him to speak to us. The cost of losing your core customers and trying to get them back during a down economy will be much greater than the cost of investing in them and trying to keep them.

I suppose if I were younger, I would be investing in Africa.

The fact that a lot of people, especially younger folks, are not investing in the stock market is something we really think needs addressing.

Remember that all financial markets are filled with good but not necessarily innocent people looking after their own self-interests before they look after yours.

The future is always coming up with surprises for us, and the best way to insulate yourself from these surprises is to diversify.

You must trust yourself more than you trust others. Pay attention to your inner voice - it will tell you if how and in what you are investing is right for you.