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Financial Quotes

Finance Quotes

  • "The City is a machine miraculously organized for extracting gold from the seas, airs, clouds, from barren lands, holds of ships, mines, plantations, cottage hearth-stones, trees and rock."
    Christina Stead (1902–1983), Australian writer
    Source: “The Sensitive Goldfish,” The Salzburg Tales (1934)
  • "There are two times in a man's life when he should not speculate: when he can’t afford it and when he can."
    Mark Twain (1835–1910), US writer
    Source: Following the Equator (1899)
  • "Investing is an activity of forecasting the yield over the life of the asset; speculation is the activity of forecasting the psychology of the market."
    John Maynard Keynes (1883–1946), British economist
    Source: Attributed (1938?)
  • "Markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent."
    John Maynard Keynes (1883–1946), British economist
    Source: Quoted in Straight Talk on Investing (Jack Brennan, 2004)
  • "If human nature felt no temptation to take a chance there might not be much investment merely as a result of cold calculation."
    John Maynard Keynes (1883–1946), British economist
    Source: The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (1936)
  • "The world of finance hails the invention of the wheel over and over again, often in a slightly more unstable form."
    J. K. Galbraith (1908–2006), US economist and diplomat
    Source: A Short History of Financial Euphoria (1993)
  • "A speculator is a man who observes the future, and acts before it occurs."
    Bernard Baruch (1870–1965), US financier and economist
    Source: Baruch: My Own Story (1957)
  • "I made my money by selling too soon."
    Bernard Baruch (1870–1965), US financier and economist
    Source: Quoted in The Global Trader (Barbara Rockefeller, 2001)
  • "We should never lose sight of the underlying essence of a market—a place where buyers and sellers come together. Every other feature—whether crafted by tradition or technology—exists only to serve that primary purpose."
    Arthur Levitt, Jr (1931–), US author and former chairman of the US Securities and Exchange Commission
    Speech to the Columbia Law School, New York City.
    Source: “Dynamic Markets, Timeless Principles” (September 23, 1999)
  • "There is no human feeling to the US securities markets and sometimes no discernible evidence of human intelligence either. But they work."
    Robert J. Eaton (1940–), US automobile industry executive and engineer
    Source: Speech (March 18, 1996)
  • "Wall Street, runs the sinister old gag, is a street with a river at one end and a graveyard at the other. This is striking, but incomplete. It omits the kindergarten in the middle."
    Fred Schwed (1901–1966), US author
    Source: Where Are The Customers' Yachts? (1940)
  • "All these financiers, all the little gnomes of Zürich and the other financial centres, about whom we keep on hearing."
    Harold, Lord Wilson of Rievaulx (1916–1995), British prime minister
    Source: Speech, House of Commons, British Parliament (November 12, 1956)
  • "Financial markets … resent any kind of government interference but they hold a belief deep down that if conditions get really rough the authorities will step in."
    George Soros (1930–), US financier, entrepreneur, and philanthropist
    Source: The Crisis of Global Capitalism (1998)
  • "If you must play, decide on three things at the start: the rules of the game, the stakes, and the quitting time."
    Anonymous
    Chinese proverb
  • "On Wall Street he and a few others—how many?—three hundred, four hundred, five hundred?—had become precisely that…Masters of the Universe."
    Tom Wolfe (1931–), US novelist and journalist
    Source: The Bonfire of the Vanities (1987), ch. 1
  • "The biggest public fallacy is that the market is always right. The market is nearly always wrong. I can assure you of that."
    Jim Rogers (1935–), US banker and management consultant
    Source: Quoted in Market Wizards (John D. Schwager, 1989)
  • "Take care to sell your horse before he dies. The art of life is passing losses on."
    Robert Frost (1874–1963), US poet
    Source: The Ingenuities of Debt
  • "A group of lemmings looks like a pack of individuals compared with Wall Street when it gets a concept in its teeth."
    Warren Buffett (1930–), US entrepreneur and financier
    Source: Quoted in Treasury of Investment Wisdom (Bernice Cohen, 1999)
  • "The derivatives genie is now well and truly out of the bottle, and these instruments will almost certainly multiply in variety and number until some event makes their toxicity clear."
    Warren Buffett (1930–), US entrepreneur and financier
    Source: Letter to shareholders (2003)
  • "The range of derivatives contracts is limited only by the imagination of man (or sometimes, so it seems, madmen). Say you want to write a contract speculating on the number of twins to be born in Nebraska in 2020. No problem—at a price, you will easily find an obliging counterparty."
    Warren Buffett (1930–), US entrepreneur and financier
    Source: Letter to shareholders (2003)
  • "In our view, derivatives are financial weapons of mass destruction carrying dangers that, while latent, are potentially lethal."
    Warren Buffett (1930–), US entrepreneur and financier
    Source: Letter to shareholders (2003)
  • "You only find out who is swimming naked when the tide goes out."
    Warren Buffett (1930–), US entrepreneur and financier
    Source: Letter to shareholders (2001)
  • "Although it's easy to forget sometimes, a share is not a lottery ticket. It's part-ownership of a business."
    Peter Lynch (1944–), US fund manager
    Source: One Up On Wall Street (1990)
  • "Twenty years in this business convinces me that any normal person using the customary three per cent of the brain can pick stocks as well as, if not better, than the average Wall Street expert."
    Peter Lynch (1944–), US fund manager
    Source: One Up On Wall Street (1990)
  • "If you spend more than 14 minutes a year worrying about the market, you've wasted 12 minutes."
    Peter Lynch (1944–), US fund manager
    Source: Quoted in Barron's Guide to Making Investment Decisions (Donald R. Sease and John Prestbo, 1994)
  • "The little I know of it has not served to raise my opinion of what is vulgarly called the Monied Interest; I mean, that blood-sucker, that muckworm, that calls itself the friend of government."
    William Pitt the Elder (Earl of Chatham) (1708–1778), British prime minister
    Source: Speech to the House of Lords (November 22, 1970)
  • "The best traders have no ego. You cannot let ego get in the way of a trade that is a loser; you have to swallow your pride and get out."
    Tom Baldwin, US financial trader
    Source: Quoted in Market Wizards (John D. Schwager, 1989)
  • "What is high finance? It's knowing the difference between one and ten, multiplying, subtracting and adding. You just add noughts. It's no more than that."
    John Bentley (1940–), British entrepreneur
    Source: Attributed
  • "Reversion to the mean is the iron rule of the financial markets."
    John Clifton Bogle (1929–), US investment analyst, founder, and CEO of the Vanguard Group
    Source: Speech given at the University of Missouri (October 22, 2002)
  • "I used to think that if there was reincarnation, I wanted to come back as the President or the Pope or as a .400 baseball hitter, but now I would like to come back as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody."
    James Carville (1944–), US political consultant, campaign manager to Bill Clinton
    Source: Attributed
  • "A market is the combined behaviour of thousands of people responding to information, misinformation and whim."
    Kenneth Chang, US journalist
    Source: Attributed
  • "Nobody beats the market, they say. Except for those of those of us who do."
    David N. Dreman (1937–), US investor
    Source: Contrarian Investment Strategies (1999)
  • "Anybody who plays the stock market not as an insider is like a man buying cows in the moonlight."
    Daniel Drew (1797–1879), US financier
    Source: Quoted in Boom and Bust (Christopher Woo, 1989)
  • "One market paradigm that I take exception to is: Buy low and sell high. I believe far more money is made by buying high and selling at even higher prices."
    Richard Driehaus (1942–), US fund manager
    Source: Quoted in The New Market Wizards (John D. Schwager, 1992)
  • "It is not whether you are right or wrong that's important, but how much money you make when you're right and how much you lose when you're wrong."
    Stanley Druckenmiller (1954–), US financier
    Source: Quoted in The New Market Wizards (John D. Schwager, 1992)
  • "Don’t think about what the market's going to do; you have absolutely no control over that. Think about what you're going to do if it gets there."
    William Eckhardt, US mathematician and financial trader
    Source: Quoted in The New Market Wizards (John D. Schwager, 1992)
  • "Amateurs look for challenges; professionals look for easy trades. Losers get high from the action; the pros look for the best odds."
    Alexander Elder, Estonian-born US financial trader and psychiatrist
    Source: Come Into My Trading Room (2002)
  • "Patience is the hardest part of trading and investing, but also the most important, for it is in the waiting that we make bigger profits."
    William F. Eng, US financial trader and author
    Source: Trading Rules: Strategies for Success (1990)
  • "A successful trader studies human nature and does the opposite of what the general public does."
    W. D. Gann (1878–1955), US trader and financial forecaster
    Source: How to Make Profits Trading in Commodities (1942)
  • "In the short-run, the market is a voting machine but in the long run, the market is a weighing machine."
    Benjamin Graham (1894–1976), US economist and investor
    Source: The Intelligent Investor (1949)
  • "To suppose that the value of a common stock is determined purely by a corporation's earnings discounted by the relevant interest rates and adjusted for the marginal tax rate is to forget that people have burned witches, gone to war on a whim, risen to the defense of Joseph Stalin and believed Orson Welles when he told them over the radio that the Martians had landed."
    Jim Grant, US investor and financial commentator
    Source: Quoted in Value Investing Made Easy (Janet Lowe, 1997)
  • "I have noticed that everyone who has ever tried to tell me that markets are efficient is poor."
    Larry Hite, US investment manager
    Source: Quoted in Market Wizards (John D. Schwager, 1989)
  • "The City is, in terms of its basic functioning, a far-off country of which we know little."
    John Lanchester (1962–), British journalist and novelist
    Source: London Review of Books (January 3, 2008)
  • "In an ideal world, one populated by vegetarians and Esperanto speakers, derivatives would be used for one thing only: reducing levels of risk. The list of individual traders who have lost more than a billion dollars at a time betting on derivatives is not short."
    John Lanchester (1962–), British journalist and novelist
    Source: London Review of Books (January 3, 2008)
  • "The game of speculation is the most uniformly fascinating game in the world. But it is not a game for the stupid, the mentally lazy, the person of inferior emotional balance, or the get-rich-quick adventurer. They will die poor."
    Jesse Livermore (1877–1940), US financier
    Source: How To Trade in Stocks (1940)
  • "There is time to go long, time to go short and time to go fishing."
    Jesse Livermore (1877–1940), US financier
    Source: Quoted in Come Into My Trading Room (Alexander Elder, 2002)
  • "Market values are fixed only in part by balance sheets and income statements; much more by the hopes and fears of humanity; by greed, ambition, acts of God, invention, financial stress and strain, weather, discovery, fashion and numberless other causes impossible to be listed without omission."
    Gerald M. Loeb (1899–1975), US investor, author
    Source: The Battle for Investment Survival (1935)
  • "You can picture price fluctuations around an equilibrium level as a rubber band being stretched—if it gets pulled too far, eventually it will snap back. As a short-term trader, I try to wait until the rubber band is stretched to its extreme point."
    Linda Bradford Raschke, US financial trader
    Source: Quoted in The New Market Wizards (John D. Schwager, 1992)
  • "Discipline allows you to trade effectively. You can take your ego out of it. You can go wrong 60, 70 percent of the time and still make a lot of money. If you ignore the discipline of managing risk, you have to be right 80 percent of the time or more, and I don’t know anyone who's that good."
    Larry Rosenberg, US financial trader
    Source: Quoted in 500 of the Most Witty, Acerbic and Erudite Things Ever Said About Money (Philip Jenks, 2002)
  • "Finance is the art of passing currency from hand to hand until it finally disappears."
    Robert W. Sarnoff (1918–1997), US media executive
    Source: Quoted in An Introduction to International Political Economy (Alison M. S. Watson, 2004)
  • "I have probably purchased fifty “hot tips” in my career, maybe even more. When I put them all together, I know I am a net loser."
    Charles Schwab (1937–), US investment broker
    Source: How To Be Your Own Stockbroker (1986)
  • "Remember, the price that people agree to in the pit is not the price that people think is going to exist in the future. It's the price that both sides vehemently agree won’t be there."
    Jeffrey Silverman, US director of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange
    Source: Quoted in 500 of the Most Witty, Acerbic, and Erudite Things Ever Said About Money (Philip Jenks, 2002)
  • "Trading has been, and always will be, a hard way to make an easy living."
    Jeffrey Silverman, US director of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange
    Source: Quoted in 500 of the Most Witty, Acerbic, and Erudite Things Ever Said About Money (philip Jenks, 2002)
  • "A good technician gets it right maybe 60% of the time. And a great technician, maybe 61% of the time."
    Gary B. Smith, US financial analyst and trader
    on technical analysis of financial markets
    Source: Attributed
  • "Investing in the market without knowing what stage it is in is like selling life insurance to 20 year olds and 80 year olds at the same premium."
    Victor Sperandeo, US financial trader
    Source: Quoted in The New Market Wizards (John D. Schwager, 1992)
  • "Never ask a trader if he is profitable: you can easily see it in his gesture and gait."
    Nassim Nicholas Taleb (1960–), Lebanese-born US academic and writer, former derivatives trader
    Source: Fooled by Randomness (2004)
  • "The time of maximum pessimism is the best time to buy and the time of maximum optimism is the best time to sell."
    Sir John Templeton (1912–), British-Bahamian investor and philanthropist
    Source: Quoted in The Book of Investing Wisdom (Peter Krass, 1999)
  • "Usually God favours the people who try to do good. So, when you find that the crowd is desperately trying to sell, help them and buy. When you find that the crowd is overenthusiastically trying to buy, help them and sell. It usually works out."
    Sir John Templeton (1912–), British-Bahamian investor and philanthropist
    Source: Interview on Nightly Business Review (February 2004)
  • "A market that slowly grinds higher is a good buy. A market that soars is usually a good sell."
    Neal Weintraub, US financial trader and author
    Source: Tricks of the Floor Trader (1995)
  • "Remember this crisis began in regulated entities. This happened right under our noses."
    Paul S. Atkins (1958–), US former member of the Securities and Exchange Commission
    Source: Quoted in the Washington Post (December 16, 2008)
  • "It is hard for us … to even see a scenario within any kind of realm of reason that would see us losing one dollar in any of those transactions."
    Joseph J. Cassano (1955?–), US former executive of AIG insurance
    On trading in credit derivatives. AIG received a federal bailout of $85 billion in September 2008.
    Source: Comment (August 2007)
  • "This proposal is stunning and unprecedented in its scope and lack of detail … It would allow the secretary of the Treasury to intervene in our economy by purchasing at least $700 billion of toxic assets. It would allow the secretary to hold onto those assets for years and to pay millions of dollars to hand-picked firms to manage those assets. It would do nothing, in my view, to help a single family save a home."
    Chris Dodd (1944–), US senator
    On Henry Paulson's bailout plan for the US financial system.
    Source: Senate Banking Committee hearing on the Paulson Plan (September 29, 2008)
  • "In the past six months, our federal government has devised a dozen strategies to save America's financial markets. Each plan has been more costly, more risky, and less aligned with the principles of our country's free market economy than the last. I am disappointed to say that this latest plan puts all the rest of them to shame."
    Mike Enzi (1944–), US senator
    Source: Senate Banking Committee hearing on the Paulson Plan (September 29, 2008)
  • "No half-measures, but a $700bn bail-out aimed at mopping up the bad debts of every lender in the land. This was … red-blooded Bolshevism, seizing the commanding heights of the financial system. You gotta love the Americans: if they do something, they do it big."
    Jonathan Freedland (1967–), British journalist
    On the US Treasury secretary's Wall Street bailout plan.
    Source: Guardian (London) (October 8, 2008)
  • "Henry Paulson is to finance what Donald Rumsfeld was to military strategy, Dick Cheney to geopolitics and Michael Chertoff to flood defence."
    Anatole Kaletsky (1952–), British journalist and economist
    On the US Treasury secretary's Wall Street bailout plan.
    Source: The Times (London) (September 25, 2008)
  • "Recently, on the front page of Section C of the Wall Street Journal, a hedge fund manager who was also closing up shop (a $300 million fund), was quoted as saying, "What I have learned about the hedge fund business is that I hate it." I could not agree more with that statement."
    Andrew Lahde (1970–), US hedge fund manager
    Source: Wall Street Journal (October 17, 2008)
  • "I was in this game for the money. The low hanging fruit, i.e. idiots whose parents paid for prep school, Yale, and then the Harvard MBA, was there for the taking. These people … rose to the top of companies such as AIG, Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers and all levels of our government. All of this … only ended up making it easier for me to find people stupid enough to take the other side of my trades. God bless America."
    Andrew Lahde (1970–), US hedge fund manager
    Announcing his retirement at the age of 37.
    Source: Wall Street Journal (October 17, 2008)
  • "The arrangement bore the same relation to actual finance as fantasy football bears to the NFL."
    Michael Lewis (1960–), US writer and former financial trader
    On credit default swaps.
    Source: Condé Nast Portfolio (December 2008)
  • "Don’t blow it up."
    Henry Paulson (1946–), US Treasury Secretary
    Pleading on bended knee to House speaker Nancy Pelosi for her to back his $700bn Wall Street bailout plan.
    Source: Senate Banking Committee hearing on the Paulson Plan (September 29, 2008)
  • "The Treasury's plan has little for those outside of the financial industry. It is aimed at rescuing the same financial institutions that created this crisis with the sloppy underwriting and reckless disregard for the risk they were creating, taking or passing on to others."
    Richard Shelby (1934–), US senator
    Source: Senate Banking Committee hearing on the Paulson Plan (September 29, 2008)
  • "To be generous, you could call it an unregulated, uncapitalized insurance market. But really, you would call it a gaming contract."
    Christopher Whalen, US managing director of Institutional Risk Analytics
    On credit default swaps.
    Source: Quoted by Nicholas Varchaver and Katie Benner in Fortune (September 30, 2008)
  • "The really scary part is that we don’t have a clue. This has become essentially the dark matter of the financial universe."
    Chris Wolf, US hedge fund manager
    On the risk posed by credit default swaps.
    Source: Quoted by Nicholas Varchaver and Katie Benner in Fortune (September 30, 2008)
  • "We should probably stop trading derivatives, anything more complex than regular options … I am an options trader, and I don’t understand options. How do you want a regulator to understand them?"
    Nassim Nicholas Taleb (1960–), Lebanese-born US academic and writer, former derivatives trader
    Source: Interviewed on Bloomberg Television (January 29, 2009)
  • "What we have found over the years in the marketplace is that derivatives have been an extraordinarily useful vehicle to transfer risk from those who shouldn’t be taking it to those who are willing to and are capable of doing so."
    Alan Greenspan (1926–), US economist and former chairman of US Federal Reserve Board
    Source: Addressing the Senate Banking Committee (2003)
  • "Not only have individual financial institutions become less vulnerable to shocks from underlying risk factors, but also the financial system as a whole has become more resilient."
    Alan Greenspan (1926–), US economist and former chairman of US Federal Reserve Board
    Source: Remark (2004)
  • "It seems superfluous to constrain trading in some of the newer derivatives and other innovative financial contracts of the past decade. The worst have failed; investors no longer fund them and are not likely to in the future."
    Alan Greenspan (1926–), US economist and former chairman of US Federal Reserve Board
    Source: The Age of Turbulence (2007)
  • "Wall Street got drunk and now it's got a hangover. And the question is, how long will it sober up and not try to do those fancy financial instruments?"
    George W. Bush (1946–), US former president
    Source: Speech (July 2008)
  • "If our laws are not extended to control the new kinds of super-powerful, super-complex and potentially super-risky investment vehicles, they will one day cause a financial disaster of global-systemic proportions."
    John Lanchester (1962–), British journalist and novelist
    Source: London Review of Books (January 3, 2008)
  • "Some skeptics are calling Henry Paulson's $700 billion rescue plan for the US financial system "cash for trash." Others are calling the proposed legislation the Authorization for Use of Financial Force, after the Authorization for Use of Military Force, the infamous bill that gave the Bush administration the green light to invade Iraq."
    Paul R. Krugman (1953–), US economist
    Source: New York Times (September 21, 2008)
  • "Blaming the hedge funds for the crisis is like blaming the passengers in a bus crash."
    Paul Marshall, British hedge fund manager
    Source: Speaking to a Treasury Committee inquiry (January 28, 2009)
  • "I didn’t understand how they were turning all this garbage into gold."
    Anonymous
    On the securitization of subprime mortgages.
    Source: Quoted in Condé Nast Portfolio (New York) (December 2008)
  • "Private equity has absolutely no reason to exist. The private equity holder has all the upside and the banks all the downside."
    Nassim Nicholas Taleb (1960–), Lebanese-born US academic and writer, former derivatives trader
    Comments made at the World Economic Forum, January 2009.
    Source: Quoted in James Saft's Reuters blog (January 30, 2009)
  • "I want them poor and they deserve to be poor. You can’t have capitalism without punishment."
    Nassim Nicholas Taleb (1960–), Lebanese-born US academic and writer, former derivatives trader
    Comments made at the World Economic Forum, January 2009.
    Source: Quoted in James Saft's Reuters blog (January 30, 2009)
  • "I don’t think there is a sound UK bank now, at least, if there is one I don’t know about it. The City of London is finished, the financial centre of the world is moving east. All the money is in Asia. Why would it go back to the West? You don’t need London."
    Jim Rogers (1935–), US banker and management consultant
    Source: Speaking on Bloomberg television (January 20, 2009)
  • "When car crashes happen, people don’t blame cars or stop driving them, they blame the drivers! Derivatives are the same."
    Terri Duhon, US financier
    Source: Quoted in Fool's Gold (Gillian Tett, 2009)
  • "Financial hydrogen bombs built on personal computers by 26-year-olds with MBAs."
    Felix Rohatyn (1928–), US investment company executive
    On complex derivatives.
    Source: Quoted in Fool's Gold (Gillian Tett, 2009)
  • "What kind of monster has been created here? It's like you raised a cute kid who then grew up and committed a horrible crime."
    Anonymous
    Comment by a financier at JP Morgan Stern on complex derivatives.
    Source: Quoted in Fool's Gold (Gillian Tett, 2009)
  • "To suggest that the source of market volatility is unreason is to imply that if people were fully rational markets could be stable. But even if people were affectless calculating machines they would still be ignorant of the future, and markets would still be volatile. The root cause of market instability is the insuperable limitation of human knowledge."
    John Gray (1948–), British academic and writer
    Source: London Review of Books (November 19, 2009)

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