Quotes About Assets

A balance sheet is simply a list of your assets, your liabilities, and what each item is currently worth so you can arrive at your net worth. Your net worth is total assets minus total liabilities.

Maintaining a positive cash flow (more money coming in than going out) helps you increase your net worth.

market capitalization (or market cap).

If international investing interests you and you see it as a good way to be more diversified (beyond the U.S. stock market), then consider exchange-traded funds (ETFs) as a convenient way to do it.

Families are only a means of exploitation,' he declared. 'Parents treat children as capital assests and children wait for parents to die so that they will have an unearned income.' 'So children spy on fathers,' Mercy put in, 'and sons are sent far from their parents--' 'That the young may not inherit the prejudices of the old.

In the 1920s, he decided that it was cheaper to drill for oil than to buy the overvalued shares of other oil companies. After the 1929 stock market crash, he completely changed tack; he saw that oil shares were selling at a great discount to assets, and he turned to prospecting for oil on the floor of the stock exchange—in

Hell no. Anybody sues me I ain't got no money. See, that's the poor person's best insurance policy: no assets.

Environmental influences almost invariably point investors down the path to investment failure. Advertisements flog stocks at equity market peaks, with nary a mention of diversifying fixed-income assets. After stocks suffer bear-market losses, the media tout the beneficial effects of owning bonds as an important part of a well-balanced portfolio. The overwhelming bulk of messages to investors suggest owning yesterday's darling and avoiding yesterday's goat.

The management of taxable mutual-fund assets without considering the tax consequences of trading activity represents a highly visible, yet little considered scandal. A serious fiduciary with responsibility for taxable assets recognizes that only extraordinary circumstances justify deviation from a simple strategy of selling losers and holding winners.

The investor with a long-term horizon begins with a portfolio composed entirely of risky assets. Then, as the investor's investment horizon contracts, the investor moves assets from high-risk to low-risk positions.

Sensible investors take great care to minimize the tax bill associated with moving assets from the high-risk, long-term portfolio to the low-risk, short-term portfolio. Although the tax code introduces many complexities to investment decision making, as a starting point consider moving taxable long-term assets to the low-risk portfolio, thereby allowing tax-deferred holdings to continue to receive shelter from taxes.

From a superficial perspective, tax-exempt bonds appear to offer investors the opportunity to place fixed-income assets in taxable accounts (where their special tax characteristics lessen or eliminate tax consequences), freeing capacity in tax-deferred accounts for higher-tax-burdened assets. Regrettably, the problems of credit risk and callability lessen the appeal of tax-exempt bonds to investors.

Table 1.2 Markets Occasionally Crush Concentrated Portfolios Source: Ibbotson Associates. Stocks, Bonds, Bills, and Inflation 2004 Yearbook (Chicago: Ibbotson Associates, 2004).

Larger portfolios impede investment advisor efforts to manage assets actively

To the extent that size impedes performance, increases in assets lead to lower returns for fund shareholders.

Hitler's government, the Deutsche Bank, and most of Germany's large corporations regarded the absorption of Austria into the Reich as a test case for managing the emerging German empire in Eastern Europe. The theft of Jewish assets that had taken years in Germany was carried out in Austria in months.

I have a lot of money.

So much news about the president's assets, the president's broadsides, the president's teeth, the president's business dealings, the president's shoes: it got boring.

most basic fact of accounting.

In Haiti, untitled rural and urban real estate holdings are together worth some 5.2 billion. To put that sum in context, it is four times the total of all the assets of all the legally operating companies in Haiti, nine times the value of all assets owned by the government, and 158 times the value of all foreign direct investment in Haiti's recorded history to 1995.

Formal property's contribution to mankind is not the protection of ownership; squatters, housing organizations, mafias, and even primitive tribes manage to protect their assets quite efficiently. Property's real breakthrough is that it radically improved the flow of communications about assets and their potential.

appurtenances

Hoarding remained a synonym beloved of bureaucrats for retaining your own assets.

When the economy is good and everyone is making money, banks and other lenders can be surprisingly loose about demanding adequate valuation of the assets they're basing their loan amounts on. But when times get bad, it's just like Robert Frost once said: "A bank is a place where they lend you an umbrella in fair weather and ask for it back when it begins to rain.