“By periodically investing in an index fund…the know-nothing investor can actually outperform most investment professionals.”
— Warren Buffett
“Don’t look for the needle in the haystack. Just buy the haystack.”
— John Bogle
“There’s been far, far, far more money made through salesmanship abilities than through investment abilities. And the people you pay to help identify [stock winners] don’t know how to identify them. They do know how to sell you”
— Warren Buffett
“All the time and effort that people devote to picking the right fund, the hot hand, the great manager, have in most cases led to no advantage.”
— Peter Lynch
“Forecasts may tell you a great deal about the forecaster; they tell you nothing about the future.”
— Warren Buffett
“You make more money selling advice than following it. It’s one of the things we count on in the magazine business—along with the short memory of our readers.”
— Steve Forbes
“The only value of stock forecasters is to make fortune tellers look good.”
— Warren Buffett
“Number one rule of Wall Street: I don’t care if you’re Warren Buffett or if you’re Jimmy Buffet, nobody knows if a stock is gonna go up, down, sideways or in circles, least of all stock-brokers.”
— Mark Hannah
“I never attempt to make money on the stock market. I buy on the assumption that they could close the market the next day and not reopen it for five years.”
— Warren Buffett
“The important thing about an investment philosophy is that you have one you can stick with.”
— David Booth
“Everybody has some information. The function of the markets is to aggregate that information, evaluate it, and get it incorporated into prices.”
— Merton Miller
“Pundits forecast not because they know, but because they are asked.”
— John Kenneth Galbraith
“The difficulty lies, not in the new ideas, but in escaping from the old ones.”
— John Maynard Keynes
“The most important single central fact about a free market is that no exchange takes place unless both parties benefit.”
— Milton Friedman
“Most people might just as well buy a share of the whole market, which pools all the information, than delude themselves into thinking they know something the market doesn’t.”
— Merton Miller
“The market is smarter than we are and no matter how smart we get, the market will always be smarter than we are.”
— Kenneth French
“Almost all of us should act as if prices are right.”
— Kenneth French
“Both large and small investors should stick with low-cost index funds.”
Warren Buffett
“Investing should be more like watching paint dry or watching grass grow. If you want excitement, take $800 and go to Las Vegas.”
— Paul Samuelson
“The surest way to find an actively managed fund that will have top-quartile returns is to look for a fund that has bottom-quartile expenses.”
— Burton Malkiel
“There are two kinds of investors, be they large or small: those who don’t know where the market is headed and those who don’t know that they don’t know.”
— William Bernstein
“I take the market-efficiency hypothesis to be the simple statement that security prices fully reflect all available information.”
— Eugene Fama
“Wall Street’s favorite scam is pretending luck is skill.”
— Ron Ross
“Nobody knows which company will prove a good long-term investment.”
— Michael Lewis
“I don’t try to be clever at all. The idea that I could see what no one else can is an illusion.”
— Daniel Kahneman
“Everything in life, individually or socially, is a trade-off. We determine the risk levels we’re willing to tolerate.”
— Robert Merton
Sources: see Appendix.
