Investor Quotes

#1. 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

#2. To be a value investor, you have to be willing [and able] to suffer pain.

Jean-Marie Eveillard

#3. Just as a fisherman must watch the ebb and flow of the tides, an investor and businessperson must be keenly aware of the subtle shifts in cash flow.

Robert Kiyosaki

#4. Whenever the investor sold out in an upswing as soon as the top level of the previous well-recognized bull market was reached, he had a chance in the next bear market to buy back at one third (or better) below his selling price.

Benjamin Graham

#5. In order to be a really good investor, you need to be a little bit of a philosopher as well.

Daniel S. Loeb

#6. Average" isn't so hot at the race track given those steep track takes. "Average" is pretty decent for stocks, something like 6 percent above the inflation rate. For a buy-and -hold investor, commissions and taxes are small.

William Poundstone

#7. If General Motors is worth $60 a share to an investor it must be because the full common-stock ownership of this gigantic enterprise as a whole is worth 43 million (shares) times $60, or no less than $2,600 million.

Benjamin Graham

#8. A True Investor Never Give-up Investing

Jonathan Feldman

#9. To obtain financial freedom, one must be either a business owner, an investor, or both, generating passive income, particularly on a monthly basis.

Robert T. Kiyosaki

#10. I think that it depends what you mean by successful. If you mean 'make money' you need to be part of the machine unless you're one of those superhuman people who can do everything by yourself, and have workaholic tendencies and really good advisers and a good investor.

Sia Furler

#11. British Empire acted as an agency for imposing free markets, the rule of law, investor protection and relatively incorrupt government on roughly a quarter of the world.

Niall Ferguson

#12. I am a huge, huge, huge fan of index funds. They are the investor's best friend and Wall Street's worst nightmare.

Jonathan Clements

#13. I like putting my money into things like food and shelter. I'm probably a bad example of an investor.

Simon Baker

#14. I'm a very passive investor.

Kirk Kerkorian

#15. What I'm trying to say is that for the average investor, what I would encourage them to do is to understand that there's inflation and growth. It can go higher and lower and to have four different portfolios essentially that make up your entire portfolio that gets you balanced.

Ray Dalio

#16. People ignore facts which contradict the theory in the mind of the investor. Dis-confirming evidence must be seeked out to beat this theory.

Manoj Arora

#17. If the world couldn't see your results, would you rather be thought of as the world's greatest investor but in reality have the world's worst record? Or be thought of as the world's worst investor when you were actually the best?

Warren Buffett

#18. Both from the standpoint of stocks and bonds, an investor wants to go where the growth is.

Bill Gross

#19. One must give up the fantasy of a perspicacious gunslinger/investor
outwitting the market.

John Allen Paulos

#20. The single greatest edge an investor can have is a long-term orientation.

Seth Klarman

#21. It is only by understanding the emotion of others that an investor has a chance to produce superior results.

John Templeton

#22. It's waiting that helps you as an investor, and a lot of people just can't stand to wait. If you didn't get the deferred-gratification gene, you've got to work very hard to overcome that.

Charlie Munger

#23. As an investor with small capital, one should prefer businesses that have high returns on capital and that require little incremental investment to grow.

Warren Buffett

#24. If the investor is uneducated, anything he or she invests in will be risky. So it's not the investment that is risky. It's the investor.

Robert Kiyosaki

#25. Anyone with a pension or retirement is an investor in the stock market.

Brad Katsuyama

#26. An investor doesn't have a prayer of picking a manager that can deliver true alpha.

Eugene Fama

#27. Independent thinking is not just helpful in becoming a successful investor, it's required.

Whitney Tilson

#28. What is the most common investor mistake? Trading - getting in and getting out at all the wrong times, for all the wrong reasons.

Kenneth Fisher

#29. If
you're an investor, you're looking on what the asset is going to do, if
you're a speculator, you're commonly focusing on what the price of the
object is going to do, and that's not our game.

Warren Buffett

#30. I am probably the biggest equity investor in the history of modern Russia.

Alexander Lebedev

#31. The intelligent investor is a realist who sells to optimists and buys from pessimists.

Benjamin Graham

#32. For the investor who knows what he is doing, volatility creates opportunity.

John Train

#33. The purchase of a bargain issue presupposes that the market's current appraisal is wrong, or at least that the buyer's idea of value is more likely to be right than the market's. In this process the investor sets his judgement against that of the market. To some this may seem arrogant or foolhardy.

Benjamin Graham

#34. It's the investor who is risky, not the investment.

Robert Kiyosaki

#35. You say: "I'm a blue sky thinker." Investor thinks: "You have no business model, and you don't know how to ship."

Guy Kawasaki

#36. When an investor focuses on short-term investments, he or she is observing the variability of the portfolio, not the returns - in short, being fooled by randomness.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

#37. No matter how careful you are, the one risk no investor can ever eliminate is the risk of being wrong. Only by insisting on what Graham called the "margin of safety" - never overpaying, no matter how exciting an investment seems to be - can you minimize your odds of error.

Benjamin Graham

#38. A good investor in this new world knows to always expect the unexpected.

Jim Cramer

#39. Whether a tops-down or bottoms-up investor in bonds, stocks, or private equity, the standard analysis tends to judge an investor or his firm on the basis of how the bullish or bearish aspects of the cycle were managed.

Bill Gross

#40. It is the long-term investor ... who will in practice come in for the most criticism ... For it is the essence of his behavior that he should be eccentric, unconventional, and rash in the eyes of average opinion

John Maynard Keynes

#41. Fraud will always exist. Enforcement of anti-fraud laws is a useful deterrent, but in the end there's no substitute for investor vigilance. Government regulations provide a false sense of security - and that's worth less than no sense of security at all.

John Stossel

#42. Price fluctuations have only one significant meaning for the true investor. They provide him with an opportunity to buy wisely when prices fall sharply and to sell wisely when they advance a great deal.

Benjamin Graham

#43. A speculator is one who runs risks of which he is aware and an investor is one who runs risks of which he is unaware.

John Maynard Keynes

#44. Active management leads to lots of poor investor behavior. It sends people chasing after whoever has the hot hand at the moment.

Barry Ritholtz

#45. The historical data support one conclusion with unusual force: To invest with success, you must be a long-term investor.

John C. Bogle

#46. Suppose you were a real estate investor with a 1/3 interest in the best apartment complex in town, the best mall, and the best office building. Would you feel like a poor, undiversified investor? No! But as soon as you get into stocks, people feel this way. Partly, people need to justify their fees.

Charlie Munger

#47. You can invest with less risk and make more money in the stock market. All you have to do is not be an average investor. Intelligence is the ability to make finer distinctions.

Robert Kiyosaki

#48. Objective tests of managerial ability are few and far from scientific. In most cases the investor must rely upon a reputation which may or may not be deserved.

Benjamin Graham

#49. 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

#50. I see myself as a private-equity investor that helps rebuild companies. Restructuring is a cottage industry in that there aren't that many serious practitioners.

Wilbur Ross

#51. The tax-exempt privilege is a feature always reflected in the market price of [municipal] bonds. The investor pays for it.

Louis D. Brandeis

#52. As an investor in small companies, I don't care how rich Microsoft is. I care about what my opportunities are.

Esther Dyson

#53. annually. It will tell the investor how to use the data

Kenneth Eade

#54. Here's what you should say [to an investor]: 'this is what my company does' It's that simple. What you're trying to do is get potential investors to fantasize about how your product or service will make a boatload of money. They can't fantasize if they don't know what you do.

Guy Kawasaki

#55. The institutional investor remains the bigger influence on individual trades simply because the institutional investor has more money to support the order and that will have more of an impact on the stock.

Maria Bartiromo

#56. Every venture capitalist says at some point, 'I wish I could run this company myself' - to be the entrepreneur instead of the investor.

Alan Patricof

#57. The investor who permits himself to be stampeded or unduly worried by unjustified market declines in his holdings is perversely transforming his basic advantage into a basic disadvantage.

Benjamin Graham

#58. Losing some money is an inevitable part of investing, and there's nothing you can do to prevent it. But to be an intelligent investor, you must take responsibility for ensuring that you never lose most or all of your money.

Benjamin Graham

#59. The ability to say no is a tremendous advantage for an investor.

Warren Buffett

#60. Kai-Fu's Innovation Works is the top very-early-stage fund in China. We are proud to be an investor, and hope that IW will help to produce in China companies on the scale of Facebook, Zynga, or Groupon.

Yuri Milner

#61. Your investor's edge is not something you get from Wall Street experts. It's something you already have. You can outperform the experts if you use your edge by investing in companies or industries you already understand.

Peter Lynch

#62. As an investor my job is to figure out what will happen rather than what should happen.

David Einhorn

#63. Everybody has a product to sell - no matter whether you're an employee, a founder, or an investor. It's true even if your company consists of just you and your computer. Look around. If you don't see any salespeople, you're the salesperson.

Peter Thiel

#64. In 2008, when almost every other investor got crushed, and even the Wall Street "experts" were down by almost half, I was up 17 percent - beating the S&P Average by over 50 percent.

Reminiscences of a Stock Market Flea

James J. Houts

#65. They flooded liquidity in the marketplace but the mortgage rate is based much more on expectations of inflation. So if the average investor believes that there is inflation coming, they'll move that rate up.

Franklin Raines

#66. An investor who proposes to ignore near-term market fluctuations needs greater resources for safety and must not operate on so large a scale, if at all, with borrowed money.

John Maynard Keynes

#67. As an investor I cannot tell that. We cannot predict the success or failure.

Ron Conway

#68. Only in the exceptional case, where the integrity and competence of the advisers have been thoroughly demonstrated, should the investor act upon the advice of others without understanding and approving the decision made.

Benjamin Graham

#69. The worst way to release bad news is to bury it in the financial statement footnotes, in the hope that no one will see it. A diligent investor or analyst always reads the footnotes, and will not appreciate having to dig so deep to uncover potentially critical information.

Steven M. Bragg

#70. an MIT AI PhD can generally walk alone into an investor meeting wearing a coconut-shell bra, perform a series of improvised birdcalls, and walk out with $1 million.

Gideon Lewis-Kraus

#71. As a serial entrepreneur, angel investor and public company CEO, nothing irks me more than when a startup founder talks about wanting to cash in with an initial public offering.

Jay Samit

#72. Damn inflation, full speed ahead,' Greenspan has said in both action and word. I think an investor should believe him and invest accordingly.

Bill Gross

#73. With 'posts' running in the millions, Internet message boards have become an essential part of the savvy investor's arsenal.

Gary Weiss

#74. You don't need every investor to believe that you can succeed. You only need one.

Ben Horowitz

#75. While it might seem that anyone can be a value investor, the essential characteristics of this type of investor-patience, discipline, and risk aversion-may well be genetically determined.

Seth Klarman

#76. Wealth is not determined by investment performance, but by investor behavior.

Nick Murray

#77. Change is the investor's only certainty.

Thomas Rowe Price Jr.

#78. If the response you finally receive from me is 'thanks but no thanks', then please accept at face value that I would really not be the right investor for you. You've got to trust me on this, and in this case take 'no' for an answer.

David S. Rose

#79. My advice to the average investor in 1988 is to be patient and think long-term. It will take 18 months for confidence to get better and, in the meantime, this is absolutely no place for short-term money.

Louis Navellier

#80. The sillier the market's behavior, the greater the opportunity for the business like investor.

Benjamin Graham

#81. We can extrapolate from the study that for the long term individual investor who maintains a consistent asset allocation and leans toward index funds, asset allocation determines about 100% of performance.

Roger G. Ibbotson

#82. She reverse engineered a startup based on market conditions, industry trends, and nascent investor fads.

Douglas Rushkoff

#83. I had an investor who said to me he'd keep his money with me as long as I didn't have a girlfriend and I didn't start combing my hair.

Martin Shkreli

#84. I used to be a health-care investor a long time ago in the public markets. One thing I learned that we tried to apply here is that investing in small molecules, trying to invest in the next treatment, there's an element of gambling to that.

Bill Maris

#85. Industries with rapid change are the enemy of the investor. Tech businesses, particularly biotech, is a problem from that point of view. All industries work with change, but you should ideally be investing in businesses with a low rate of change, not a high rate of change.

Mohnish Pabrai

#86. Being a successful investor & winning in the stock market is a matter of skill & discipline and not luck alone

Jack D. Schwager

#87. Graham's wonderful sentence as, an investor needs only two things: cash and courage. Having only one of them is not enough.

Seth Klarman

#88. The average investor does significantly worse than a simple index ... It's literally because of the way our brains are wired.

James O'Shaughnessy

#89. If you are going to be a great investor, you have to fit the style to who you are.

Michael Burry

#90. It all comes down to interest rates. As an investor, all you're doing is putting up a lump-sump payment for a future cash flow.

Ray Dalio

#91. If you are a true investor, it does not matter if the markets are going up or coming down. A true investor does well in any market condition.

Robert T. Kiyosaki

#92. To be an investor you must be a believer in a better tomorrow.

Benjamin Graham

#93. If you have more than 120 or 130 I.Q. points, you can afford to give the rest away. You don't need extraordinary intelligence to succeed as an investor.

Warren Buffett

#94. A wise man once asked to his mentor, "What advice would you give the average investor?" his reply was, "DON'T BE AVERAGE.

Celeste Young

#95. The intelligent investor shouldn't ignore Mr. Market entirely. Instead, you should do business with him- but only to the extent that it serves your interests.

Benjamin Graham

#96. Figure 28: The intelligent investor: strategy, process requirements and attitude

Frederik Vanhaverbeke

#97. Global capital is agnostic - it has no loyalties. There's an overhang of capital in the U.S., and the key is yield pickup. What Africa is providing is a diversification play and also opportunities for yield pickup for the investor that's aware of what he or she is doing.

Euvin Naidoo

#98. My view is that an investor is better off knowing a lot about a few investments than knowing a little about each of a great many holdings. One's very best idea's are likely to generate higher returns for a given level of risk than one's hundredth or thousandth best idea.

Seth Klarman

#99. he's incredibly responsive, which is one of the best characteristics you can have in an investor. He'll get back to you any hour - day or night - quickly, on anything that matters.

Adam Grant

#100. I am not criticizing investing in the stock market; I am an investor.

Grace Napolitano