Quotes & Sayings About Investors

In the 1950s and 1960s, the heroes were the long-term investors; today the heroes are the wise guys. — Michael Steinhardt

Technology tends toward avoidance of risks by investors. Uncertainty is ruled out if possible. People generally prefer the predictable. Few recognize how destructive this can be, how it imposes severe limits on variability and thus makes whole populations fatally vulnerable to the shocking ways our universe can throw the dice. — Frank Herbert

Individual security bargains may be located by the process of security analysis practically at any time. They can be bought with good overall results at all periods except when the general market itself is clearly in a selling range for investors. They show up to best advantage during the years in which the market remains in a relatively narrow and neutral area. — Benjamin Graham

What Enron was doing, what caused investors to embrace it in a rapture of baffled awe, was hiding debt. — P. J. O'Rourke

For instance, even though entrepreneurs in technology often know the statistics that about 80 percent of founders are forced out of their companies by their venture capital investors, I have never heard anyone tell me that this would happen to them. In — Jeffrey Pfeffer

Below, we itemize some of the quite different lessons investors seem to have learned as of late 2009 - false lessons, we believe. To not only learn but also effectively implement investment lessons requires a disciplined, often contrary, and long-term-oriented investment approach. It requires a resolute focus on risk aversion rather than maximizing immediate returns, as well as an understanding of history, a sense of financial market cycles, and, at times, extraordinary patience. — Seth Klarman

This is the free enterprise system. The only place in the world that I can recall where companies never failed was the old Soviet Union. This is what investors do in the free enterprise and capitalism system. And, yes, the free enterprise system can be cruel. But the problem with this administration is that small businesses have been the ones that have suffered the most, the kind that need investors, the kind that don't need the hundreds of pages, the thousands of pages of regulations that continue to plague them and have them continue to hold back on hiring and investment. — John McCain

Still, I figure we shouldn't' discourage fans of actively managed funds. With all their buying and selling, active investors ensure the market is reasonably efficient. That makes it possible for the rest of us to do the sensible thing, which is to index. Want to join me in this parasitic behavior? To build a well-diversified portfolio, you might stash 70 percent of your stock portfolio into a Wilshire 5000-index fund and the remaining 30 percent in an international-index fund. — Paul Samuelson

Fannie Mae has traditionally only bought and sold mortgages. But when a loan held by the company goes into foreclosure, Fannie Mae gains ownership of the underlying property until it is resold to new investors. — Charles Duhigg

Thanks to a deal finalized in 2008, Chicago's parking meters will be operated for the next 75 years by a group of investors put together by Morgan Stanley, including the sovereign wealth fund of Abu Dhabi. — Thomas Frank

It's really hard to break through the clutter and get the attention of the top investors, as they typically only look at deals that come in from a warm, credible referral. There's absolutely nothing more credible than getting an endorsement from a well-known subject matter expert who has already put their own money into your company. — Scott Weiss

Boards of directors are allowed to work together, so are banks and investors and corporations in alliances with one another and with powerful states. That's just fine. It's just the poor who aren't supposed to cooperate. — Noam Chomsky

I think it could have real changing effects on the financial markets of our country, it could cause investors to think more about real rates of return and that in turn could spawn new kinds of products, — Robert Rubin

For value investors, General Motors is a tempting target. The company's share of the North American auto market has steadily declined for two decades, and analysts say the company suffers from weak management and unexciting cars. — Alex Berenson

other investors saw the price going down, — Yuval Noah Harari

investors. I have been a student of the philosophy of value investing, which of course was established, executed, and popularized by superinvestors Benjamin Graham, Warren Buffet, and Seth Klarman among — Sundeep Bajikar

We can bring together rich natural resources, innovative research and development, smart investors, and risk-taking farming and manufacturing entrepreneurs. — Anthony Pratt

God doesn't want us to be gamblers. He wants us to be investors. — Joyce Meyer

The goal - at least the way I think about entrepreneurship - is you realize one day that you can't really work anyone else. You have to start your won thing. It almost doesn't matter what the thing is. We had six different business plan changes, and then the last one was PayPal.
If that one didn't work out, if we still had the money and the people, obviously we would not have given up. We would have iterated on the business model and done something else. I don't think there was ever clarity as to who we were until we knew it was working. By then, we'd figured out our PR pitch and told everyone what we do and who we are. But between the founding and the actual PayPal, it was just like this tug-of-war where it was like, "We're trying this, this week." Every week you go to investors and say, "We're doing this, exactly this. We're really focused. We're going to be huge." The next week you're like, "That was a lie. — Jessica Livingston

Foreclosure is to no one's benefit. I've heard estimates that mortgage investors lose 40 to 50 percent on their investment if it goes into foreclosure. — Henry Paulson

Fundamentally cheap stocks are often held in low regard by market participants. Something may be tainting their perception in investors' minds. — Kenneth Fisher

The unhappy theory of business ethics is this: you have a fiduciary responsibility to maximize profit. Period. To do anything other than that is to cheat your investors. And in a competitive world, you don't have much wiggle room here. — Seth Godin

If we're talking about buying exchanges abroad, we have to have global securities standards, as we have global banking regulations. I'm talking about margins. Now, the United States has certain margin requirements that are not the same in London. Investors and hedge funds that want to borrow more money against securities ? if they can't in the U.S., they go abroad. That could add additional risks to the global economy. — Muriel Siebert

Globalization replaced technology as the hope for the future. Since the '90s migration "from bricks to clicks" didn't work as hoped, investors went back to bricks (housing) and BRICs (globalization). The result was another bubble, this time in real estate. — Peter Thiel

Short-term performance envy causes many of the shortcomings that lock most investors into a perpetual cycle of underachievement. Watch your competitors not out of jealousy but out of respect and focus your efforts not on replicating others' portfolios but on looking for opportunities where they are not. The only way for investors to significantly outperform is to periodically stand far apart from the crowd, something few are willing, or able, to do. — Seth Klarman

Most successful investors, in fact, do nothing most of the time. — Jim Rogers

The financial capital is being concentrated by corporations, institutional investors, and even our pension funds, and being reinvested in companies that repeat this process because it provides the highest return on that financial capital. — Paul Hawken

You will never see as many great women investors or traders as men. Period. End of story. — Paul Tudor Jones

What we have created instead, as customers and employers and investors, is mountains of paper wealth so enormous that a handful of people in charge of them can take millions and billions for themselves without hurting anyone. Apparently.

Many members of my generation are disappointed. — Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

I love what I do. I don't do it for the money. I work on behalf of investors that I like and want to do well for. I'm a competitive person. — Bill Ackman

Logic is the subject that has helped me most in picking stocks, if only because it taught me to identify the peculiar illogic of Wall Street. Actually Wall Street thinks just as the Greeks did. The early Greeks used to sit around for days and debate how many teeth a horse has. They thought they could figure it out just by sitting there, instead of checking the horse. A lot of investors sit around and debate whether a stock is going up, as if the financial muse will give them the answer, instead of checking the company. — Peter Lynch

Most active mutual funds are more interested in collecting fees than in boosting returns for investors. — David F. Swensen

What motivates most gold purchasers is their belief that the ranks of the fearful will grow ... As 'bandwagon' investors join any party, they create their own truth - for a while. — Warren Buffett

Bank One has got one of the best credit card divisions, ... The perception of investors is that financial services stocks are affected by interest rates and they're not. — David Dreman

Electronic communications networks match trades between investors directly, without using a market maker or specialist as an intermediary. — Alex Berenson

The amount of data and analysis available for free is a true example of information explosion has leveled the playing field for individual investors. — Maria Bartiromo

Be greedy when others are fearful and fearful when others are greedy.' Easier said than done for the vast majority of stock traders ... On every stock trade there is someone who wants to sell and someone who wants to buy, at least at a particular price ... the person who is selling thinks that she is getting out just in time while the person buying thinks that he is about to make good money.
... The truth is that the market doesn't really reflect some magical perfect valuation of a stock under the efficient market hypothesis. It reflects the mass consensus of how actual individual investors value the stock. It is the sum total of everyone's hopes and fears ... — M.E. Thomas

Change is the investor's only certainty. — Thomas Rowe Price Jr.

Commissions add up, taxes are a big drag, margin ain't cheap. A good accountant costs money as well. The math on this one is obvious, yet investors often fail to recognize it: Keep your costs low and your turnover lower, and you will win in the end. — Barry Ritholtz

(It's easier for investors and bosses to spend time and money going after a proven market, even though proven markets are the hardest to break into.) — Seth Godin

Value investors will not invest in businesses that they cannot readily understand or ones they find excessively risky. Hence few value investors will own the shares of technology companies. Many also shun commercial banks, which they consider to have unanalyzable assets, as well as property and casualty insurance companies, which have both unanalyzable assets and liabilities. — Seth Klarman

When he had explained why investors who wanted low risk and moderate returns should put their capital into national debt shares, Daisy had interrupted him by asking, Father, wouldn't it be wonderful if hummingbirds had tea parties and we were small enough to be invited? — Lisa Kleypas

A True Investor Never Give-up Investing — Jonathan Feldman

To be sure, the provision of liquidity alone can by no means solve the problems of credit risk and credit losses; but it can reduce liquidity premiums, help restore the confidence of investors, and thus promote stability. — Ben Bernanke

Before Volcker's speech, bonds had been conservative investments, into which investors put their savings when they didn't fancy a gamble in the stock market. After Volcker's speech, bonds became objects of speculation, a means of creating wealth rather than merely storing it. — Michael Lewis

We paired this announcement of the R&D [commitment] with the so-called Breakthrough Energy Coalition, which is 27 [major investors] saying, "Hey, we'll put significant money into [energy innovations] when they're ready to spin out probably into startup companies." — Bill Gates

Where you want to be is always in control, never wishing, always trading, and always first and foremost protecting your ass. That's why most people lose money as individual investors or traders because they're not focusing on losing money. They need to focus on the money that they have at risk and how much capital is at risk in any single investment they have. If everyone spent 90 percent of their time on that, not 90 percent of the time on pie-in-the-sky ideas on how much money they're going to make, then they will be incredibly successful investors. — Paul Tudor Jones

As events developed, the debate about jobs and energy extraction in general became more divisive. Those at one extreme embraced the industry as an expression of old-fashioned free enterprise. It offered work that built character and brought deserving rewards for those with initiative, whether they be roughnecks working twelve-hour shifts, investors staking their capital, or researchers staking their reputation on the next big discovery. At the other end of the spectrum were those who saw the industry as a relic of grandfather clauses and cronyism that dated to a period of predatory exploitation, when fantastical deals were pitched by door-to-door peddlers, manufacturing waste was buried in lagoons on private property, and unions were nonexistent. The middle ground was occupied by an untold number of consumers used to cheap plentiful energy, and property owners, who had their worries but also were able to calculate how much a mineral rights lease might be worth. — Tom Wilber

In the end, alchemy, whether it is metallurgical or financial, fails. A base business can not be transformed into a golden business by tricks of accounting or capital structure. The man claiming to be a financial alchemist may become rich. But gullible investors rather than business achievements will usually be the source of his wealth. — Warren Buffett

As an investor I cannot tell that. We cannot predict the success or failure. — Ron Conway

There are only a few things investors can do to counteract risk: diversify adequately, hedge when appropriate, and invest with a margin of safety. It is a precisely because we do not and cannot know all the risks of an investment that we strive to invest at a discount. The bargain element helps to provide a cushion for when things go wrong. — Seth Klarman

My biggest disappointment was, of course, the coup attempts, ... The economy was proceeding very well, but in 1989 we had the most serious coup attempt and ... many of the investors who were set to come here had to tell me that they chose to go to other countries because of the uncertainty brought about by (the coup attempt.) If that had not happened, I'm sure our economy would just be booming today ... — Corazon Aquino

Think today's interest rates are high? The Pilgrims borrowed $7000 from a London company of 70 investors in 1620, and devoted the next 23 years to repaying it at 43 percent. — L. M. Boyd

Successful investors tend to be unemotional, allowing the greed and fear of others to play into their hands. By having confidence in their own analysis and judgement, they respond to market forces not with blind emotion but with calculated reason. Successful investors, for example, demonstrate caution in frothy markets and steadfast conviction in panicky ones. Indeed, the very way an investor views the market and it's price fluctuations is a key factor in his or her ultimate investment success or failure. — Seth Klarman

I should say, the one thing you run into is, if you're trying to raise a round you have to decide, well, how much money are you trying to raise? And then you have to justify that to your investors, because they want to know why you [are] raising that much? Why aren't you raising either twice as much or half as much? — David Plotz

My name is Wendell Potter and for 20 years I worked as a senior executive at health insurance companies, and I saw how they confuse their customers and dump the sick
all so they can satisfy their Wall Street investors. — Wendell Potter

There are two kinds of investors, be they large or small: those who don't know where the market is headed and those who don't know what they don't know. Then again, there is a third type of investor: the investment professional, who indeed knows he doesn't know, but whose livelihood depends upon appearing to know. — William J. Bernstein

A financial crisis is a great time for professional investors and a horrible time for average ones. — Robert Kiyosaki

Investors are sometimes too busy looking for profits to notice where the truth ends and the deception begins. — Andrew Ross Sorkin

I think it's a mistake to rely too much on any one economic factor. It's why investors try to spread their portfolio round. — Paul Wolfowitz

The moment a large investor doesn't believe a government will pay back its debt when it says it will, a crisis of confidence could develop. Investors have scant patience for the years of good governance - politically fraught fiscal restructuring, austerity and debt rescheduling - it takes to defuse a sovereign-debt crisis. — Andrew Ross Sorkin

Digital locks are roach motels: copyrighted works check in, but they don't check out. Creators and investors lose control of their business - they become commodity suppliers for a distribution channel that calls all the shots. Anti-circumvention isn't copyright protection: it's middleman protection. — Cory Doctorow

It is not the responsibility of the Federal Bank - nor would it be appropriate - to protect lenders and investors from the consequences of their decisions — Ben Bernanke

Bootstrapping allows you total creative freedom. For example, if you decide to approach your business in a certain way that makes it a two- or three-year process to get to your first product, you can do that, versus being rushed into it by investors. — Nick Woodman

The brilliant creative core of capitalism ... is the story the entrepreneurs and capital investors tell themselves about the future. How they intend to alter it, what they expect to gain in return, where they will raise the capital to accomplish their vision. Many of their stories turn out to be flawed or mistaken, of course, but the capacity to envision a set of future events and then act to fulfill them is a central source of capitalism's strength and its dominance of society. — William Greider

I believe in fighting with investors to reduce the amount of equity they get and then being as generous as you possibly can with employees. — Sam Altman

At the first rumors of war, timid investors in various government stock, being panic-stricken, sell out, to their loss and the gamblers' gain. — Randal Cremer

One of the great things about Silicon Valley is, irrespective of how competitive you might be with another company or how closely you might be working with that company, there's a great sort of give and take, and camaraderie from - between - some of the executives in the valley and some of the other investors in the valley. — Dick Costolo

The problem is that the choice we make in the market don't fully reflect our values as citizens. We might make different choices if we understood the social consequences of our purchases or investments and if we knew all other consumers and investors would join us in forbearing from certain great deals whose social consequence were abhorrent to us. — Robert B. Reich

Maybe it's sex appeal, but there's something about an airplane that drives investors crazy. — Alfred Kahn

Commercial banks are very good for certain businesses, like loans and guarding other people's money. They're not great investors or entrepreneurs. — John Gutfreund

A hedge fund manager whose clients demand monthly performance reports has different needs than any individual investors with a 20-year time horizon. The needs of that long-term investor differ markedly from someone who is retiring in three years. — Barry Ritholtz

Many investors seem to have forgotten a hard reality: There are frequent periods when stock markets don't do much. — Jim Rogers

With all that IMF money, the Thailand's and Mexico's are spared the consequences of their fiscal incompetence, and Wall Street's heavy hitters are spared the consequences of their stupid investments. The global economy is a rigged game, rigged so Third World politicians, rich investors and global corporations win - and U.S. taxpayers lose. — Pat Buchanan

A pin lies in wait for every bubble. And when the two eventually meet, a new wave of investors learns some very old lessons: First, many in Wall Street (a community in which quality control is not prized) will sell investors anything they will buy. Second, speculation is most dangerous when it looks easiest — Warren Buffett

The cash held by US companies are hitting all time records. Companies are using some of this money to buy back their own stock at record rates. When a company is doing this it is saying to it's investors: We don't have any good ideas what to do with this, so here--maybe you do. — Geoff Colvin

Most of us have not heard about Master Limited Partnerships. These special financing arrangements allow oil and gas investors to avoid paying certain corporate income taxes, but are not available to clean energy businesses. — Bernie Sanders

I think what we need is better understanding of how to do risk analysis of a CDO, but that they still can perform a very valuable function because they can aggregate these risks and pass them around so that mortgages or other kinds of loans can be packaged and sold to investors all over the world, who in most times, would justify a small amount of each one. — Robert F. Engle

our environment is much stronger than our intellect. Remarkably few investors - either amateur or professional - truly understand this critical point. — Guy Spier

I think I'm different. I've got alpha, baby ... I think I can find the profits of surprise, the yield of real knowledge. Everyone says that, of course, but most investors are all beta
just volatility, just the random motion of the surf ... they get killed. To generate alpha, I need help, direction, signposts, analysts, and sometimes even brandy-toting salesmen. — George Gilder

Real investors should never feel bearish because the time to buy value is when markets go down! — Irving Kahn

The efficient market theory is one of the better models in the sense that it can be taken as true for every purpose I can think of. For investment purposes, there are very few investors that shouldn't behave as if markets are totally efficient. — Eugene Fama

It should strengthen investors' confidence. This is done through transparency, high quality financial reports, and a standardized economic market. This is not just for China, but also for the world market as a whole. — Richard Grasso

The companies I have traditionally seen do best over the long term had lead investors for their seed rounds — Keith Rabois

I've been investing in the stock market for 27 years and, within that time, have helped investors beat the market nearly four to one. — Louis Navellier

Investors have to ask themselves two questions. How much can we grow our investments? And, can we afford our mistakes? — Mohamed El-Erian

well-functioning market requires all three types of investors for socially beneficial projects to have access to cheap capital. Value investors allocate capital to its most productive use. Speculators, because they trade frequently, provide the liquidity and trading volume that allows value investors and relative value traders to execute their trades cheaply. They also ensure that information is disseminated quickly. — Michael Pettis

We wish to control big business so as to secure among other things good wages for the wage-workers and reasonable prices for the consumers. Wherever in any business the prosperity of the business man is obtained by lowering the wages of his workmen and charging an excessive price to the consumers we wish to interfere and stop such practices. We will not submit to that kind of prosperity any more than we will submit to prosperity obtained by swindling investors or getting unfair advantages over business rivals. — Theodore Roosevelt

The idea that you try to time purchases based on what you think business is going to do in the next year or two, I think that's the greatest mistake investors make because it's always uncertain. People say it's a time of uncertainty. It was uncertain on September 10th, 2001, people just didn't know it. It's uncertain every single day. So take uncertainty as part of being involved in investment at all. But uncertainty can be your friend. I mean, when people are scared they pay less for things. We try to price. We don't try to time at all. — Warren Buffett

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

The late 90s almost forced me to identify myself as a value investor, because I thought what everybody else was doing was insane. — Michael Burry

It's a fact: stock investors sometimes lose money on their way to wealth. Get over it. — Jane Bryant Quinn

The principal role of the mutual fund is to serve its investors. — John C. Bogle

With joint-stock corporations, investors can place bets on the success of many different companies, without having to play a central management role in any one of them. This allows investors to diversify their financial holdings. It also allows them to capture profits on their investments, without having to get involved in the dirty, troublesome business of actually running a company. — Jim Stanford

Even fans of actively managed funds often concede that most other investors would be better off in index funds. But buoyed by abundant self-confidence, these folks aren't about to give up on actively managed funds themselves. A tad delusional? I think so. Picking the best-performing funds is 'like trying to predict the dice before you roll them down the craps table,' says an investment adviser in Boca Raton, FL. 'I can't do it. The public can't do it.' — Paul Samuelson

The Indian diaspora is not a capital-accumulating diaspora. The Indian diaspora is doctors, lawyers, professors. Or newspaper sellers. They are basically trade- or profession-oriented, and so they're not major investors in their home country. — Jairam Ramesh

As a bull market turns into a bear market, the new pros turn into optimists, hoping and praying the bear market will become a bull and save them. But as the market remains bearish, the optimists become pessimists, quit the profession, and return to their day jobs. This is when the real professional investors re-enter the market. — Robert Kiyosaki

Just imagine if police enforced their zero-tolerance strategy in finance. They would arrest people for even the slightest infraction, whether it was chiseling investors on 401ks, providing misleading guidance, or committing petty frauds. Perhaps SWAT teams would descend on Greenwich, Connecticut. They'd go undercover in the taverns around Chicago's Mercantile Exchange. — Cathy O'Neil

I learned an important lesson - that the value of the stock is not the same as the underlying value of the company. The stock goes up and down according to the whims and wiles of Wall Street. The value of the company depends on elements that contribute to the creation of real value - things like providing superior products at fair prices. You need to be learning and innovating, giving your people interesting, motivating work and compensating them fairly, creating value for your community, and doing it all in a way that yields a good profit. That's not what much of Wall Street values, but it's what creates long-term value for investors. — Jim Koch

To me 'The Big Easy' is shorthand for owning big stocks that are easy for wary investors to buy into. These stocks tend to outperform during the back half of bull markets. — Kenneth Fisher