Stock Picking Quotes & Sayings

Here is a dirty little secret: Stock-picking is wildly overrated. Sure, it makes for great cocktail party chatter, and what is more fun than delving into a company's new products? But the truth is that individual stocks are riskier than broad indices. — Barry Ritholtz

The probability of ten consecutive heads is 0.1 percent; thus, when you have millions of coin tossers, or investors, in the end there will be thousands of very successful practitioners of coin tossing, or stock picking. — Alan Greenspan

I have never for a minute felt in was my stock picking abilities. I feel that my stock picking abilities aided- I was able to pick out which are the good stocks in the good market, but I have been blessed with a great market. — Jim Cramer

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

A good many young writers make the mistake of enclosing a stamped, self-addressed envelope, big enough for the manuscript to come back in. This is too much of a temptation to the editor. — Ring Lardner

I've as good a right to preserve the healthy body God gave me, as if I were not a woman. — Fanny Fern

Stock-picking is like gambling: those who win well, seldom bet, but when they do, they bet heavily. — Charlie Munger

Never be too busy for the people you love. Never allow pursuits or possessions to become bigger priorities than your relationships. Love is what gives meaning to life. — Dave Willis

Will customers keep supporting the enormous overhead required to sustain ineffectual, unproductive stock picking across an array of thousands of individual funds devoted to every investing 'style' and economic sector or regional subgroup that some marketing idiot can dream up? Not likely. A brutal shakeout is coming and one of its revelations will be that stock picking is a grossly overrated piece of the puzzle, that cost control is what distinguishes a competitive firm from an uncompetitive one. — Holman W. Jenkins Jr.

How come Superman could stop bullets with his chest, but always ducked when someone threw a gun at him? — Steven Wright

Bipolar disorder is about buying a dozen bottles of Heinz ketchup and all eight bottles of Windex in stock at the Food Emporium on Broadway at 4:00 a.m., flying from Zurich to the Bahamas and back to Zurich in three days to balance the hot and cold weather (my sweet and sour theory of bipolar disorder), carrying $20,000 in $100 bills in your shoes into the country on your way back from Tokyo, and picking out the person sitting six seats away at the bar to have sex with only because he or she happens to be sitting there. It's about blips and burps of madness, moments of absolute delusion, bliss, and irrational and dangerous choices made in order to heighten pleasure and excitement and to ensure a sense of control. The symptoms of bipolar disorder come in different strengths and sizes. Most days I need to be as manic as possible to come as close as I can to destruction, to get a real good high
a $25,000 shopping spree, a four-day drug binge, or a trip around the world. — Andy Behrman

There are domains in which expertise is not possible. Stock picking is a good example. And in long-term political strategic forecasting, it's been shown that experts are just not better than a dice-throwing monkey. — Daniel Kahneman

[In picking stocks] You really have to know a lot about business. You have to know a lot about competitive advantage. You have to know a lot about the maintainability of competitive advantage. You have to have a mind that quantifies things in terms of value. And you have to be able to compare those values with other values available in the stock market. — Charlie Munger

I don't pretend to be a digital savant or even a digital apprentice. — Dan Rather

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

Hedge funds try to produce above-average investment returns using tactics ranging from traditional stock-picking to complex derivative and arbitrage plays. High minimum investments, redemption restrictions and aggressive strategies make them suitable mainly for more sophisticated and well-heeled investors. — Alex Berenson

Old houses mended, Cost little less than new before they're ended. — Colley Cibber

Best friends, no matter what they do or how much they hurt you, it only hurts as much as it does because they are your best friend. And none of us are perfect. Mistakes were made for best friends to forgive; it's what makes being a best friend official. — J.A. Redmerski

Life is not the road or even the destination, but the journey, — Jaume Cabre

It's hard to know which stars in the sky will turn into black holes. And which ones will open up worm holes into entire new universes. — James Altucher

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

Whenever you have the kind of market that is taking shape now - a wildly volatile one with big pricing discrepancies - it plays right into the hands of managers who are very focused on research and stock picking. — James Russell Lowell