Stock Fund Quotes & Sayings

Brokerage firms don't sell customers stock so much as they sell those horrible mutual funds — Michael Steinhardt

Bulls make money and bears make money, but pigs seldom do. When a stock or mutual fund is up 30%, sell one-quarter of your position. — Nancy Dunnan

The stock market's handling of new technology is kind of a joke. We have seen CNBC, CNNfn, Bloomberg, and the like turn into home-shopping networks for stocks. Fund managers and analysts go on TV and sell what's shiny and easy to sell. — Mark Cuban

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

Experience conclusively shows that index-fund buyers are likely to obtain results exceeding those of the typical fund manager, whose large advisory fees and substantial portfolio turnover tend to reduce investment yields. Many people will find the guarantee of playing the stock-market game at par every round a very attractive one. The index fund is a sensible, serviceable method for obtaining the market's rate of return with absolutely no effort and minimal expense. — Burton Malkiel

it's worth repeating that for most investors, selecting individual stocks is unnecessary - if not inadvisable. The fact that most professionals do a poor job of stock picking does not mean that most amateurs can do better. The vast majority of people who try to pick stocks learn that they are not as good at it as they thought; the luckiest ones discover this early on, while the less fortunate take years to learn it. A small percentage of investors can excel at picking their own stocks. Everyone else would be better off getting help, ideally through an index fund. — Benjamin Graham

An index fund is a fund that simply invests in all of the stocks in a market. So, for example, an index fund might invest in every single stock or almost every single stock in the U.S. market, it might invest in every single stock abroad, or it might invest in all of the bonds that are out there. And you can make a perfectly fine investing portfolio that mixes equal parts of all three of those. — William J. Bernstein

After a lifetime of picking stocks, I have to admit that Bogle's arguments in favor of the index fund have me thinking of joining him rather than trying to beat him. Bogle's wisdom and common sense are indispensable ... for anyone trying to figure out how to invest in this crazy stock market. — Jim Cramer

Whoever interrupts the conversation of others to make a display of his fund of knowledge, makes notorious his own stock of ignorance. — Sa'di S. Shaikh Muslihu-D-Din

Our standard prescription for the know-nothing investor with a long-term time horizon is a no-load index fund. I think that works better than relying on your stock broker. The people who are telling you to do something else are all being paid by commissions or fees. The result is that while index fund investing is becoming more and more popular, by and large it's not the individual investors that are doing it. It's the institutions. — Charlie Munger

I do not use short selling. The fund has not shorted a stock since the 2002 to 2003 time frame. At that time I did short three stocks, on which I broke even on two and made money on one of them. The experience taught me that I was not going to be using short selling going forward for a slew of reasons. — Guy Spier

There is one thing of which I can assure you. If good performance of the fund is even a minor objective, any portfolio encompassing one hundred stocks (whether the manager is handling one thousand dollars or one billion dollars) is not being operated logically. The addition of the one hundredth stock simply can't reduce the potential variance in portfolio performance sufficiently to compensate for the negative effect its inclusion has on the overall portfolio expectation. — Warren Buffett

I'm quite bullish. We're coming up on year 15 of a flat stock market. Historically that's a pretty good sign. So I'm not a hedge-fund manager but if I was I think I'd be feeling pretty good. — Marc Andreessen

Two-thirds of professionally managed funds are regularly outperformed by a broad capitalization-weighted index fund with equivalent risk, and those that do appear to produce excess returns in one period are not likely to do so in the next. The record of professionals does not suggest that sufficient predictability exists in the stock market to produce exploitable arbitrage opportunities. — Burton G. Malkiel

Many financial advisors recommend that you diversify for your own protection. What they fail to tell you is that it is also for their protection. Since most financial advisors cannot tell you exactly which stock or mutual fund is a great investment, they tell you to buy a bunch of them. — Robert Kiyosaki

The idea that a bell rings to signal when investors should get into or out of the stock market is simply not credible. After nearly fifty years in this business, I do not know of anybody who has done it successfully and consistently. I don't even know anybody who knows anybody who has done it successfully and consistently. Yet market timing appears to be increasingly embraced by mutual fund investors and the professional managers of fund portfolios alike. — John C. Bogle

If your 401(k) is lucky enough to have Vanguard funds, look for, respectively, the (U.S.) Total Stock Market Index Fund, Total International Stock Index Fund, and either the Short-Term Bond Index or Total Bond Market Index Fund. As already mentioned, the Fidelity Spartan series is also excellent: the Total Market Index, International Index, and U.S. Bond Index (or Short-Term Treasury Bond Index) funds. — Anonymous

At first, the only thing that I learned was to save. Then I learned about mutual fund, then later on direct stock investments. I also went into small businesses and even real estate. — Bo Sanchez

1. Investors give fund managers money at the wrong time. Now that you've had some time to read this book and understand the importance of buying stocks during fear cycles and holding during greed cycles, this first indicator should make sense. To understand this principle, imagine that you're the fund manager of a $100 billion investment fund. When the stock market crashes and you're able to purchase severely undervalued businesses with minimal debt, not only do you lack funds to invest, but all your resources are being depleted by scared investors. Instead of receiving money to buy the great deals, your investors are selling their shares in the fund and you don't have the capacity to take advantage of the market behavior. This reason alone severely handicaps fund managers as they attempt to beat the market. — Preston G. Pysh

Before the New York Times starts running "Portraits in Grief" of former Enron employees, it's worth remembering that even after the collapse, Enron stock is still worth more than the entire Social Security "trust fund." — Ann Coulter

Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny should take a few pointers from the mutual-fund industry. All three are trying to pull off elaborate hoaxes. But while Santa and the bunny suffer the derision of eight year olds everywhere, actively-managed stock funds still have an ardent following among otherwise clear-thinking adults. This continued loyalty amazes me. Reams of statistics prove that most of the fund industry's stock pickers fail to beat the market. — Jonathan Clements

I don't invest in the stock market, but I have pension funds - some in America and the UK. — Eric Idle

..."extreme capitalism": the obsessive, uncritical penetration of the concept of the market into every aspect of American life, and the attempt to drive out every other institution, including law, art, culture, public education, Social Security, unions, community, you name it. It is the conflation of markets with populism, with democracy, with diversity, with liberty, and with choice---and so the denial of any form of choice that imposes limits on the market. More than that, it is the elimination of these separate concepts from our political discourse, so that we find ourselves looking to the stock market to fund retirement, college education, health care, and having forgotten that in other wealthy and developed societies these are rights, not the contingent outcomes of speculative games.

James K. Galbraith, Lloyd M. Bentsen Jr. Chair in Government/Business Relations and Professor of Government, University of Texas. — James K. Galbraith

Mutual fund manager performance does not persist and the return of stock picking is zero. — William J. Bernstein