Time Investors Quotes & Sayings

Soul can't exist unless you have active, meaningful dialogue with stakeholders: employees, customers, the community, suppliers, and investors. When you launch a business, your job as the entrepreneur is to say, 'Here's a value proposition that I believe in. Here's where I'm coming from. This is my point of view.' At first, it's a monologue. Gradually it becomes a dialogue and then a real conversation. Like breaking in a baseball glove. You can't will a baseball glove to be broken in; you have to use it. Well, you have to use a new business, too. You have to break it in. If you move on to the next thing too quickly, it will never develop its soul. Look what happens when a new restaurant opens. Everyone rushes in to see it, and it's invariably awkward because it hasn't yet developed soul. That takes time to emerge, and you have to work at it constantly. — Anonymous

How could anyone be so stupid as to trust a trader? The best thing I could do was pretend to others at Salomon that I had meant to screw the customer. People would respect that. That was called jamming. I had just jammed bonds, albeit unknowingly, for the first time. I had lost my innocence. — Michael Lewis

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

The adaptive markets hypothesis says that all economic institutions, like our own species, develop and change over time, depending on the population of investors that are engaged with them. — Andrew Lo

Investors ... can't pick stocks that are better than average. Stocks are a good thing to own over time. There's only two things you can do wrong: You can buy the wrong ones, and you can buy or sell them at the wrong time. And the truth is you never need to sell them. — Warren Buffett

It's time for Haitians to have access to health care. It's time to open our borders to the Haitian diaspora, open our markets to the world. It's time to open our country to potential investors. — Michel Martelly

Instead of mindlessly tossing billions at or taking billions from the Net as such, investors should be spending their time making sure that it's the future Fords and General Motors of cyberspace that are getting the capital they need. — James Surowiecki

Investors, of course, can, by their own behavior make stock ownership highly risky. And many do. Active trading, attempts to "time" market movements, inadequate diversification, the payment of high and unnecessary fees to managers and advisors, and the use of borrowed money can destroy the decent returns that a life-long owner of equities would otherwise enjoy. Indeed, borrowed money has no place in the investor's tool kit. — Warren Buffett

While it's wonderful that investors have access to all the data now available to them, it has become a full-time job to sift through it and separate out the valuable news from the useless noise. — Maria Bartiromo

When excesses such as lax lending standards become widespread and persist for some time, people are lulled into a false sense of security, creating an even more dangerous situation. In some cases, excesses migrate beyond regional or national borders, raising the ante for investors and governments. These excesses will eventually end, triggering a crisis at least in proportion to the degree of the excesses. Correlations between asset classes may be surprisingly high when leverage rapidly unwinds. — Seth Klarman

Stocks are the things to own over time. Productivity will increase and stocks will increase with it. There are only a few things you can do wrong. One is to buy or sell at the wrong time. Paying high fees is the other way to get killed. The best way to avoid both of these is to buy a low-cost index fund, and buy it over time. Be greedy when others are fearful, and fearful when others are greedy, but don't think you can outsmart the market. If a cross-section of American industry is going to do well over time, then why try to pick the little beauties and think you can do better? Very few people should be active investors. — Alice Schroeder

For a long time, it was one of these things where - I was really much younger than now - my whole "brand" both to the investors and to our board members was this crazy Russian boy-genius who comes out and sprinkles magic dust on technology and things just work. — Max Levchin

When herding behaviour among investors ramps up, a stock's or index's growth rate can increase faster than exponentially, leading to more herding. This positive feedback brings the system to a tipping point. About two-thirds of the time, a crash results. — Didier Sornette

Most startup entrepreneurs unnecessarily spend half their time and give up half their equity in search of funding from angel investors and venture capitalists. Tens of millions of dollars are available to them for free from partners who not only don't want their equity, they don't even want to be paid back. — Jay Samit

Celtel established a mobile phone network in Africa at a time when investors told me that there was no market for mobile phones there. — Mo Ibrahim

It got a little stressful in my first two years of high school, trying to make conference calls with investors in between classes, but I definitely learned a lot of important time-management lessons. — Ben Casnocha

I know of no long-time practitioner who regrets adhering to a value philosophy; few investors who embrace the fundamental principles ever abandon this investment approach for another — Seth Klarman

In general, investors prefer companies to reward executives for producing recurring income, not one-time gains. — Alex Berenson

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

The 1969 experience has been a rude awakening for many hedge-fund investors and has left some of them with strong reservations about the whole concept. For the first time in their relatively short history, the funds are not growing: in fact, some have suffered large withdrawals of capital, and a few have actually folded. — Carol Loomis

Investors repeatedly jump ship on a good strategy just because it hasn't worked so well lately, and, almost invariably, abandon it at precisely the wrong time. — David Dreman

Value investing is simple to understand but difficult to implement. Value investors are not supersophisticated analytical wizards who create and apply intricate computer models to find attractive opportunities or assess underlying value. The hard part is discipline, patience, and judgment. Investors need discipline to avoid the many unattractive pitches that are thrown, patience to wait for the right pitch, and judgment to know when it is time to swing. — Seth Klarman

SOME PEOPLE ARE JUST born unlucky - so unlucky in fact that they do just the opposite of what they should at exactly the wrong time. Suckers? Maybe. But in the business of investing, those people have a name: retail investors. — Simon Constable

When the only people in mainstream discourse who care about the working class are Wall Street investors, it really is time to ask where our politics went wrong. — Timothy Noah

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

State funds, private equity, venture capital, and institutional lending all have their role in the lifecycle of a high tech startup, but angel capital is crucial for first-time entrepreneurs. Angel investors provide more than just cash; they bring years of expertise as both founders of businesses and as seasoned investors. — Jay Samit

In the early days, I promoted the idea of spending time in libraries to gain facts that other investors didn't have. Not many people did that kind of research, so it worked. — Kenneth Fisher

The word passive does a disservice to investors considering their options. Indexing provides an effective means of owning the market and allows investors to participate in the returns of a basket of stocks. The basket of stocks changes over time as stocks are added or removed based on its rules. — Charles R. Schwab

I hated discussing ideas with investors," he said, "because I then become a Defender of the Idea, and that influences your thought process." Once you became an idea's defender you had a harder time changing your mind about it. — Michael Lewis

In a world in which most investors appear interested in figuring out how to make money every second and chase the idea du jour, there's also something validating about the message that it's okay to do nothing and wait for opportunities to present themselves or to pay off. That's lonely and contrary a lot of the time, but reminding yourself that that's what it takes is quite helpful. — Seth Klarman

I still believe that for good business analysts a concentrated portfolio is a good strategy combined with a long term horizon. Once again, the secret to success in following the formula strategy is patience, a quality in short supply for both professionals and individual investors alike. I think investors should have a large portion of their assets in equities over time. — Joel Greenblatt

Robert M. Morgenthau, the Manhattan district attorney, has seen a few financial schemes in his time. As the lead local prosecutor in the world's financial capital, he has battled frauds like the Bank of Credit and Commerce International, which stole billions of dollars from investors worldwide. — Alex Berenson

All an investor can do is follow a consistently disciplined and rigorous approach; over time the returns will come — Seth Klarman

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(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

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

We continue to advise that investors remain committed to a patient, long-term outlook and that the best way to do well in stocks is to use a disciplined, time-tested strategy that has the benefit of empirically tested results over a variety of market environments. — James O'Shaughnessy

Venture capitalists are professional money managers. We are provided capital to invest as long as we can return it to our investors with a strong return in a reasonable amount of time. A strong return is three times cash on cash. A reasonable amount of time is ten years max. — Fred Wilson

I mean, these good folks are revolutionizing how businesses conduct their business. And, like them, I am very optimistic about our position in the world and about its influence on the United States. We're concerned about the short-term economic news, but long-term I'm optimistic. And so, I hope investors, you know - secondly, I hope investors hold investments for periods of time - that I've always found the best investments are those that you salt away based on economics. — George W. Bush

Value investing requires a great deal of hard work, unusually strict discipline, and a long-term investment horizon. Few are willing and able to devote sufficient time and effort to become value investors, and only a fraction of those have the proper mind-set to succeed. — Seth Klarman

Rather than be fearful and sell out at the worst time or get greedy when the market is way up, investors should control their emotions and not only avoid panic, but embrace the market volatility for what it is: an opportunity and a gift. Suffocate the instincts that want to make you a bad investor and rather embrace the chaos that normally causes them to rise to the surface. — Peter Mallouk

As a rule of thumb, investors should spend the bulk of their time on the disclosures of the security under study, and they should spend significant time on the reports of competitors. — Benjamin Graham^David L.Dodd

Investors frequently benefit from making decisions with less than perfect knowledge and are well rewarded for bearing the risk of uncertainty. The time other investors spend delving into the last unanswered detail may cost them the chance to buy into situations at prices so low they offer a margin of safety despite the incomplete information — Seth Klarman

Hedge funds are investment pools that are relatively unconstrained in what they do. They are relatively unregulated (for now), charge very high fees, will not necessarily give you your money back when you want it, and will generally not tell you what they do. They are supposed to make money all the time, and when they fail at this, their investors redeem and go to someone else who has recently been making money. Every three or four years they deliver a one-in-a-hundred year flood. They are generally run for rich people in Geneva, Switzerland, by rich people in Greenwich, Connecticut. — Cliff Asness

Time and again, in every market cycle I have witnessed, the extremes of emotion always appear, even among experienced investors. When the world wants to buy only [bonds], you can almost close your eyes and [buy] stocks. — Michael Steinhardt

Any time we would talk to another VC, our investors would talk him out of it: 'This is not a good company' ... So we were really stuck with our existing investors for the next round. — Sabeer Bhatia

Value investors should completely exit a security by the time it reaches full value; owning overvalued securities is the realm of speculators. — Seth Klarman

Seeds not planted or tended by choice tend to be weeds, so at least for me, it's very helpful to consciously and periodically choose which seeds I want to water, and to think through what I expect to happen from that watering. Investors can spend a lot of time and energy reacting to the latest bits of news and trying to predict the next surprise, rather than choosing a consistent set of daily actions that they can carry out as things develop, regardless of how they develop. — John Houseman

To value investors the concept of indexing is at best silly and at worst quite hazardous. Warren Buffett has observed that "in any sort of a contest - financial, mental or physical - it's an enormous advantage to have opponents who have been taught that it's useless to even try." I believe that over time value investors will outperform the market and that choosing to match it is both lazy and shortsighted. — Seth Klarman

I think the power of the short film is incredibly underrated. It is way easier to get someone to watch a 15-minute film then a full-length feature. In those 15 minutes you have the opportunity to express your voice as an artist and hopefully connect with your audience. If you are trying to be a first time feature director then a short film that demonstrates you have a grasp on the themes and concepts of the movie you want to direct is a no-brainer. Whether they are collaborators or potential investors, filmmaking is a visual art form so you obviously need visuals to show them! — Nicholas Ozeki

While I'm a venture capitalist who invests in early-stage tech companies, I often feel like a professional emailer and conference call maker. I try to spend most of my time doing whatever the companies we are investors in need me to do. — Brad Feld

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

To get our economy back on track and keep it functioning properly without the problems of our financial institutions, we need reasonable regulations that will protect Main Street while at the same time allow Wall Street to do what it does best - make money for American investors. — Marsha Blackburn