Quotes & Sayings About Earnings

My goal is to buy a company at a low multiple to normal earnings power several years out and that the company earns good returns on capital at that level of normal earnings. A holding period of more than one year also works quite well as the factors are persistent in years 2 and 3. — Joel Greenblatt

From a rational standpoint, it might be expected that man should be far more willing to express financial confidence in his skills rather than risking his earnings on the mindless meanderings of chance. Experience, however, has strongly indicated the reverse proposition to hold true. — Richard Arnold Epstein

The slave labors, but with no cheer-it is not the road to respectability, it will honor him with no citizens' trust, it brings no bread to his family, no grain to his garner, no leisure in after-days, no books or papers to his children. It opens no school-house door, builds no church, rears for him no factory, lays no keel, fills no bank, earns no acres. With sweat and toil and ignorance he consumes his life, to pour the earnings into channels from which he does no drink, into hands that never honor him. But perpetually rob and often torment. — Henry Ward Beecher

By spring of '98, each company's stock had more than quadrupled. Skeptics questioned earnings and revenue multiples higher than those for any non-internet company. It was easy to conclude that the market had gone crazy. — Peter Thiel

It is amazing to a great many of us how Congress ignores the Constitution. For example, the 13th Amendment clearly states: "Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States or any place subject to their jurisdiction." Currently, the average working person pays over forty percent of his earnings to the Government (City, State and National) and IT IS NOT VOLUNTARY! Did the people vote for these taxes? NO! They were imposed by a Communist dominated Congress. Therefore, Congress has declared that each and every wage earner is a SLAVE of the Government and the Government has a right to steal their money. WHY? — Robert Gates Sr.

I realize what it means to be financially comfortable, and I want to be that. But I'm lucky enough to be in that position. And I'm also careful. I save 38 percent of my earnings after expenses, before taxes. — David Duval

If you buy all the stocks selling at or below two times earnings, you will lose money on half of them because instead of making profits they will actually lose money, but you will only lose a dollar or so a share at most. Then others will be mediocre performers. But the remaining big winners will go up and produce fabulous results and also ensure a good overall result. — John Templeton

While the earnings of a minority are growing exponentially, so too is the gap separating the majority from the prosperity enjoyed by those happy few. This imbalance is the result of ideologies which defend the absolute autonomy of the marketplace and financial speculation. Consequently, they reject the right of states, charged with vigilance for the common good, to exercise any form of control. — Pope Francis

Inventory discipline across the brands coupled with an outstanding holiday performance at Victoria's Secret led to a 36 percent increase in fourth-quarter earnings per share at Limited Inc.. — Bill Vaughan

Human capital analysis starts with the assumption that individuals decide on their education, training, medical care, and other additions to knowledge and health by weighing the benefits and costs. Benefits include cultural and other non-monetary gains along with improvement in earnings and occupations, while costs usually depend mainly on the foregone value of the time spent on these investments. — Gary Becker

Life is full of uncertainties. Future investment earnings and interest and inflation rates are not known to anybody. However, I can guarantee you one thing.. those who put an investment program in place will have a lot more money when they come to retire than those who never get around to it. — Noel Whittaker

Savings is an important tool because it can help the poor deal with the ups and downs of irregular earnings and help them build reserves for a rainy day. — Sylvia Mathews Burwell

To constrain the brute force of the people, the European governments deem it necessary to keep them down by hard labor, poverty and ignorance, and to take from them, as from bees, so much of their earnings, as that unremitting labor shall be necessary to obtain a sufficient surplus to sustain a scanty and miserable life. — Thomas Jefferson

China is going to be one of Avon's largest market opportunities. It has a large geographic expanse, with hundreds of thousands of women in small villages really striving to make an earnings opportunity for themselves. — Andrea Jung

The more education a woman has, the wider the gap between men's and women's earnings for the same work. — Sandra Day O'Connor

One-hundred-ten years of history, great diversity, lots of new earnings drivers and I just became a grandpa - twins. And I'm buying JJ, Pfizer and Warner for their future college funds. — David O. Sacks

[W]e have a lot of evidence on what happens when you raise the minimum wage. And the evidence is overwhelmingly positive: Hiking the minimum wage has little or no adverse effect on employment while significantly increasing workers' earnings. — Paul Krugman

Why be thrifty when your old age and health care are provided for, no matter how profligate you act in your youth? Why be prudent when the state insures your bank deposits, replaces your flooded-out house, buys all the wheat you can grow? ... Why be diligent when half of your earnings are taken from you and given to the idle? — David Frum

The most difficult thing asked by our young is not our earnings but our ears. — Malcolm Forbes

looking at: For example: Improve any of those variables, and you increase your earnings. — Pablo Vici

Government as well as religion has furnished its schisms, its persecutions and its devices for fattening idleness on the earnings of the people. — Thomas Jefferson

People forget that although we can pinpoint the price, we can only guess at future earnings. The past isn't much help: It simply tells whether a market was pricey or cheap. — Barry Ritholtz

Many have given up. They stay home and watch the TV screen, living on the earnings of their parents, cousins, bothers, or uncles, and only leave the house to go to the movies or to the nearest bar. "How're you making it?" on may ask, running into them along the block, or in the bar. "Oh, I'm TV-ing it"; with the saddest, sweetest, most shamefaced of smiles, and from a great distance. This distance one is compelled to respect; anyone who has traveled so far will not easily be dragged again into the world. There are further retreats, of course, than the TV screen or the bar. There are those who are simply sitting on their stoops, "stoned," animated for a moment only, and hideously, by the approach of someone who may lend them the money for a "fix." Or by the approach of someone from whom they can purchase it, one of the shrewd ones, on the way to prison or just coming out. — James Baldwin

This crisis is not just a crisis. Consumers are understanding for the first time that [their] degree of personal happiness doesn't rise past a certain earnings threshold. — Fernando Rodes Vila

The mounting burden of taxation not only undermines individual incentives to increased work and earnings, but in a score of ways discourages capital accumulation and distorts, unbalances, and shrinks production. Total real wealth and income is made smaller than it would otherwise be. On net balance there is more poverty rather than less. — Henry Hazlitt

Chasing revenues that don't have good earnings doesn't help us or shareholders one lick. — Phebe Novakovic

Mother is the dead heart of the family spending father's earnings on consumer goods to enhance the environment in which he eats, sleeps, and watches the television. — Germaine Greer

Budget thy expenses that thou mayest have coins to pay for thy necessities, to pay for thy enjoyments, and to gratify thy worthwhile desires without spending more than nine-tenths of thy earnings. — George S. Clason

We know what happens when a woman earns money. She is far more likely than a man to spend her earnings on the health and education of her children and to invest in improving her family's standard of living. — Leila Janah

The generosity of the super-rich is sometimes proffered as evidence they're contributing as much to the nation's well-being as they did decades ago when they paid a much larger share of their earnings in taxes. — Robert Reich

All dishonest earnings are the blood of the innocent. Honest earnings are like sweet milk and make the mind pious. — Sawan Singh

Business chief executive officers and their boards succumb to the pressures of the financial markets and their fears of takeovers and pour out their energies to produce quarterly earnings - at the expense of building their companies for the long term. — J. Irwin Miller

Unpleasant odor wafting from the subprime mortgage industry that Eisman had detected. These companies disclosed their ever-growing earnings, but not much else. One of the many items they failed to disclose was the delinquency rate of the home loans they were making. — Michael Lewis

History constantly reminds us that in an uncertain world there is no visibility of prospects. Future earnings cannot be predicted with accuracy. — David Dreman

The real reason to oppose increasing tax rates on the wealthy is that it's a good bet they could do more to help the economy if they keep their money rather than have their earnings confiscated by the government and spent on another round of stimulus. — Terry Savage

The cyberspace earnings I get from Linux come in the format of having a Network of people that know me and trust me, and that I can depend on in return. — Linus Torvalds

Being captive to quarterly earnings isn't consistent with long-term value creation. This pressure and the short term focus of equity markets make it difficult for a public company to invest for long-term success, and tend to force company leaders to sacrifice long-term results to protect current earnings. — Charles Koch

The best companies are able to realize earnings in cash, not through calculations that belong in fantasyland. — David Hawkins

One tax dodge often used by multi-national companies is to squirrel their earnings abroad in foreign subsidiaries located in countries where taxes are lower. — Robert Reich

I was the first in my family to go to college, and I waitressed all the way through, using my earnings to pay for a bachelor's degree first and then a master's. I resented classmates who didn't have to work real jobs, the ones who had the luxury of taking unpaid internships that would eventually position them for high-paying careers. — Ali Liebegott

After years in the Chinese workforce, I had developed an emotional attachment to money. My earnings were my hard work and long hours; my savings were comforts deferred. — Hyeonseo Lee

Since President Kennedy signed the Equal Pay Act in 1963, the gap between men and women's earnings has narrowed by less than a half-cent per year. At this rate, American women will have to wait until 2062 to bring home the same salary as their male counterparts. — Jackie Speier

Think how weird profit margins are: We've got high unemployment and financial crises - and world record profit margins. People think the American market is very cheap. We don't. The market quite incorrectly gives full credit to today's earnings. — Jeremy Grantham

Reliability investing requires finding companies trading below their inherent worth
stocks with strong fundamentals including earnings, dividends, book value, and cash flow selling at bargain prices give their quality. — Amah Lambert

The simultaneous rise of both the working poor and non-working rich offers further evidence that earnings no longer correlate with effort. — Robert B. Reich

Jesus Christ has bought us with His blood, but, alas, He has not had His money's worth! He paid for ALL, and He has had but a fragment of our energy, time and earnings. By an act of consecration, let us ask Him to forgive the robbery of the past, and let us profess our desire to be henceforth utterly and only for Him- His slaves, owning no master other than Himself. — F.B. Meyer

Everyone has the idea of owning good companies. The problem is that they have high prices in relations to assets and earnings, and that takes all of the fun out of the game. — Charlie Munger

Instead of squirreling away your earnings early in your career, spend on experiences that will enrich your life - like diving with great white sharks. It can expose you to influential people who could open doors for you. — Blake Mycoskie

Any jerk can have short-term earnings. You squeeze, squeeze, squeeze, and the company sinks five years later. — Jack Welch

Set aside some money you can afford to lose before you begin trading. The money you set aside for trading should be about six to twelve months of your current salary or your current earnings. — Ashu Dutt

Once we break out of the framework of national states as unified entities with no internal divisions within them, we can see that there is a global shift of power, but it's from the global workforce to the owners of the world: transnational capital, global financial institutions. So, for example, the earnings of working people as a percentage of national income has by and large declined in the last couple of decades, but apparently it's declined in China more than in most places. There is certainly economic growth in China and India. Hundreds of millions of people live a lot better than they did before, but then there are hundreds of millions more who don't. In fact, it's getting worse for them in many ways. — Noam Chomsky

Of one thing the investor can be certain: A large company's need to bring in a new chief executive from the outside is a damning sign of something basically wrong with the existing management - no matter how good the surface signs may have been as indicated by the most recent earnings statement. — Philip Arthur Fisher

Traders can cause short-term volatility. In the long run, the market must revert to a sensible price/earnings multiple. — Ben Stein

In 1840, the year that Victoria and Albert were married, no woman in the kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland could vote, be elected to parliament or any other public office, attend the university, or enter a profession. If a woman married, her property, her earnings, her children, and her body legally belonged to her husband, to do with as he willed. The world of business was more hostile to women in 1840 than it had been in 1740 or 1640, and though many women were forced to work, a bare handful could make a living wage. — Gillian Gill

For many women, by the time they realize how beautiful they were, it is too late. — Robert Black

Reality bites. Micron underlines that despite the market run-up recently, there's still no confidence about growth and earnings. — David Thwaites

Everybody knows that the federal government promises a lot and delivers damn little, and pays for most of what it does deliver out of the earnings of individuals rather than the profits of great corporations. — Karl Hess

We need to accept that consumption is not the end goal of our life and stop measuring our well-being simply on the basis of earnings. We need to explicitly take the quality of our work-related life into account in judging our well-being. — Ha-Joon Chang

There's a tacit understanding among clubs that a good player shouldn't miss out on the big break of his career or a chance at exponentially improved earnings. — Tim Howard

Poverty drove their parents to have them castrated as young children, hoping they would earn a better living at court. Usually the father would take the boy to a specialist castrator, who operated by the appointment of the court. After a contract was signed, absolving the castrator from any responsibility in case of death or failure (both highly likely outcomes), the unimaginably painful operation was performed. The castrator's fee was huge and had to be paid from future earnings. — Jung Chang

In the Eisenhower era, when earnings over $400,000 were subject to 91 percent taxes and the world was a smaller place, you could count the truly wealthy on one hand: Getty, Dupont, Mellon, Rockefeller, though even those fortunes were being dispersed to children as the old robber barons died off. — Michael Shnayerson

Gary Player and others have said all of us should all give Arnold Palmer a percentage of our earnings because without you there would be no television contracts and without you it wouldn't be as good for anyone. — Charlie Rose

Stone-cutters fighting time with marble, you fore defeated
Challengers of oblivion
Eat cynical earnings, knowing rock splits, records fall down,
The square-limbed Roman letters
Scale in the thaws, wear in the rain. The poet as well
Builds his monument mockingly;
For man will be blotted out, the blithe earth die, the brave sun
Die blind and blacken to the heart:
Yet stones have stood for a thousand years, and pained thoughts found
The honey of peace in old poems. — Robinson Jeffers

One hundred percent of our earnings are reinvested in the company, and a great deal of that goes to research. — Amar Bose

In TIME June 7, 2010
On the sustainability of the publishing industry, in the Chicago Tribune:
"I think that book publishing is about to slide into the sea. We live in a literate time, and our children are writing up a storm, often combining letters and numbers ... The future of publishing: 18 million authors in America, each with an average of 14 readers, eight of whom are blood relatives. Average annual earnings: $175." - 5/26/10 — Garrison Keillor

A typical Ponzi scheme involves taking money from investors, then paying them off with money taken from new investors, rather than paying them from actual earnings. — Amy Goodman

Reasonable mergers generate substantial synergies, so that provides for earnings and cash-flow growth even if it doesn't provide for revenue growth, and I think that's a big driver. — Roger Altman

High male earnings have also become less important to women. A 2001 poll in the United States found that 80 percent of women in their twenties believed that having a husband who can talk about his feelings was more important than having one who makes a good living.11 — Stephanie Coontz

There are several things that can create an alpha - stock buybacks are one. High dividend yields are another, especially nowadays because the stock market yields more than the banks and the tenure treasury. But by and large, it tends to be companies with a strong cash flow, rising sales, accelerated earnings, a profit margin expansion. — Louis Navellier

Focus on return on equity, not earnings per share. — Warren Buffett

Thus, from a group perspective, the inventory in P Ltd is overstated by $2,000 as is the profit in S Ltd. The consolidation adjustment required is: DR Consolidated retained earnings $2,000 CR Consolidated inventory $2,000 The adjustment will allow the consolidated statement to be correctly stated. — Astranti

The concept of paying one-hundred-and-something times earnings for any company for me is just anathema. Having said that, at the end of the day, your job is to buy what goes up and to sell what goes down so really who gives a damn about PE's? — Paul Tudor Jones

A brother with small earnings may ask,'Should I also give? My earning are already so small that my family can barely make ends meet.' My reply is, 'Have you ever considered that the very reason your earnings remain so small may be because you spend everything on yourself? If God gave you more, you would only use it to increase your own comfort instead of looking to see who is sick or who has no work at all that you might help them. — George Muller

They still have some money, and they have needs to supply. They must begin immediately to pool their earnings and organize industries to participate in supplying social and economic demands. — Carter G. Woodson

Scientists used to do an experiment whereby a dog's repeated reward for performing a task was unaccountably replaced by punishment. The dog, knowing it would be penalized for doing well or doing badly, would become melancholic and inactive. This and other unforeseeable results were funded by taxing up to sixty percent of people's earnings. People became strangely melancholic and inactive
— Steve Aylett

He raised a hand in response and tossed the ear of corn into the wagon. Then he
returned to his fantasy, imagining himself running the livery instead of working there, making the decisions, placing orders, selecting new horses, agreeing to board others, and
hiring a boy to muck out the stalls and pitch hay.
In his daydream, he no longer lived in the back room. He came home at night to a small house he'd bought with his earnings. Inside, a woman waited for him. A wife. In his fantasy her hair was as golden as the ear of corn he tossed into the wagon and her
eyes as blue as the cloudless sky overhead. Catherine smiled at him and he could hear as well as see her say his name. "Jim! Welcome home. — Bonnie Dee

Any man of energy and initiative can get what he wants out of life. But when initiative is crippled by legislation or by a tax system which denies him the right to receive a reasonable share of his earnings, then he will no longer exert himself and the country will be deprived of the energy on which its continued greatness depends. — Andrew Mellon

A young financial writer once brought ridicule upon himself by stating that a certain company had nothing to commend it except excellent earnings. Well, there are companies whose earnings are excellent but whose stocks I would never recommend. In selecting investments, I attach prime importance to the men behind them. I'd rather buy brains and character than earnings. Earnings can be good one year and poor the next. But if you put your money into securities run by men combining conspicuous brains and unimpeachable character, the likelihood is that the financial results will prove satisfactory. — B.C. Forbes

In our view, though, investment students need only two well-taught courses-How to Value a Business, and How to Think about Market Prices. Your goal as an investor should simply be to purchase, at a rational price, a part interest in an easily-understandable business who's earnings are virtually certain to be materially higher five, ten and twenty years from now. — Warren Buffett

We find that firms with award-winning CEOs subsequently underperform, in terms both of stock and of operating performance. At the same time, CEO compensation increases, CEOs spend more time on activities outside the company such as writing books and sitting on outside boards, and they are more likely to engage in earnings management. — Daniel Kahneman

We really believe in the earnings. We're very proud that often we do well in the down market. But you know, there are some markets where they just lose liquidity, like 2001, 2008. — Louis Navellier

The acquisition by dishonest means and cunning,' said Levin, feeling that he was incapable of clearly defining the borderline between honesty and dishonesty. 'Like the profits made by banks,' he went on. 'This is evil, I mean, the acquisition of enormous fortunes without work, as it used to be with the spirit monopolists. Only the form has changed. Le roi est mort, vive le roi! Hardly were the monopolies abolished before railways and banks appeared: just another way of making money without work. — Leo Tolstoy

US common stock has yielded a higher return than bonds. However, price earnings ratios are much higher than they were for much of the 20th century, so it — Anonymous

And to preserve their independence, we must not let our rulers load us with perpetual debt. We must make our election between economy and liberty, or profusion and servitude. If we run into such debts, as that we must be taxed in our meat and in our drink, in our necessaries and our comforts, in our labors and our amusements, for our callings and our creeds, as the people of England are, our people, like them, must come to labor sixteen hours in the twenty-four, give the earnings of fifteen of these to the government for their debts and daily expenses; and the sixteenth being insufficient to afford us bread, we must live, as they now do, on oatmeal and potatoes; have no time to think, no means of calling the mismanagers to account; but be glad to obtain subsistence by hiring ourselves to rivet their chains on the necks of our fellow-sufferers. — Thomas Jefferson

If expectations of lifetime earnings drop, then so will spending. — Amity Shlaes

We prefer: large purchases (at least $5 million of after-tax earnings), demonstrated consistent earning power (future projections are of little interest to us, nor are "turn-around" situations), businesses earning good returns on equity while employing little or no debt, management in place (we can't supply it), simple businesses (if there's lots of technology, we won't understand it), an offering price (we don't want to waste our time or that of the seller by talking, even preliminarily, about a transaction when price is unknown). — Warren Buffett

. . . crop restrictions not only raise the price of corn and other crops but also tend to raise farmers' total revenues and earnings." Increase your corn profit by not growing corn? Here's a wonderful kind of business where everybody can get rich if they'll just do nothing. — P. J. O'Rourke

Real investment risk is measured not by the percent that a stock may decline in price in relation to the general market in a given period, but by the danger of a loss of quality and earnings power through economic changes or deterioration in management. — Benjamin Graham

We know the product is going to stink. We know that because we live in the world, and we know that everything stinks. We all believe, Hey, maybe this one wont stink. We are a hopeful species. Stupid but hopeful. But were happy in that moment between the commercial and the purchase. And I think spending your life trying to dupe innocent people out of hard-won earnings to buy useless, low-quality, misrepresented items and services is an excellent use of your energy. — Jerry Seinfeld

One of the dangers about net-net investing is that if you buy a net-net that begins to lose money your net-net goes down and your capacity to be able to make a profit becomes less secure. So the trick is not necessarily to predict what the earnings are going to be but to have a clear conviction that the company isn't going bust and that your margin of safety will remain intact over time. — Peter Cundill

The profound point is that the critical link between growth and value creation is the return on incremental capital. Since share prices tend to follow earnings over the long term, the more capital that can be deployed at high rates of return to drive greater earnings growth, the more valuable a company becomes. Warren Buffett summarized the point best: "Leaving the question of price aside, the best business to own is one that over an extended period can employ large amounts of incremental capital at very high rates of return."4 The best investments, in other words, combine strong growth with high returns on capital. — Lawrence A. Cunningham

I can remember the time when, if we wanted a house or housing, we relied on private enterprise. In fact, Americans built more square feet of housing per person than any other country on the face of the earth. Despite that remarkable accomplishment, more and more people are coming to believe that the only way we can have adequate housing is to use government to take the earnings from some and give these earnings, in the form of housing, to others. — Leonard Read

Stock prices are likely to be among the prices that are relatively vulnerable to purely social movements because there is no accepted theory by which to understand the worth of stocks ... investors have no model or at best a very incomplete model of behavior of prices, dividend, or earnings, of speculative assets. — Robert J. Shiller

A firm can have value only if it ultimately delivers earnings. — Aswath Damodaran

I know a lot of celebrity types go for Kabbalah and Scientology. But why pay 10 per cent of your earnings to someone when it's all common sense: treat others as you'd like to be treated yourself. — Gail Porter

This is the standard procedure for corporate growth these days; one company buys up another on loans that are floated on the basis of future earnings, and the monopoly or oligopoly created in this way produces the necessary funds by squeezing out competition, and passing the costs along to the consumer. The bucket that holds the new wealth is called a corporation. — Eric Kierans

If you don't feel comfortable making a rough estimate of the asset's future earnings, just forget it and move on. No one has the ability to evaluate every investment possibility. But omniscience isn't necessary; you only need to understand the actions you undertake. — Warren Buffett

Immigrants aren't the reason wages haven't gone up enough; those decisions are made in the boardrooms that too often put quarterly earnings over long-term returns. — Barack Obama

I am now at the age where I can withdraw a 25 per cent tax-free lump sum. I do not put in a set amount because my earnings are a moveable feast. — Anthea Turner

Yet he did possess one of the vital requirements to increase his earnings. Within him was a strong desire to earn more, — George S. Clason