Quotes on Stock Market

The strange fascination that the stock market exerts upon people has never ceased being a source of wonder to me.

We have a stock market which some people use like a gambling parlor.

It is not the market that is rising or falling at any moment, even if we commonly speak as though it were. In truth, prices move in response to the buying and selling decisions of countless investors, who are constantly considering the likely decisions of countless others.

Never, never pay attention to what the market is doing.

Nobody knows what the stock market is going to do or even what it ought to do. Hence, the most valuable asset in all business, which is knowledge, is necessarily absent.

Wall Street in boom days is an aggregation of madmen. The Stock Exchange becomes Bedlam well dressed.

Fortunes are made and lost by thousands of men in the stock market; they are made and kept by a few dozen.

In the stock market, facts are important, but emphasis is all important.

One thing all of us know for sure is that the stock market doesn't go down just because a lot of folks think that it has entered the heart of looney land.

Of all the mysteries of the stock exchange there is none so impenetrable as why there should be a buyer for everyone who seeks to sell. October 24, 1929 showed that what is mysterious is not inevitable. Often there were no buyers, and only wide vertical declines could anyone be induced to bid.

When I shifted my focus from beating gambling games to analyzing the stock market, I naively thought that I was leaving a world where cheating at cards was then problematic and entering an arena where regulation and the rule of law gave investors a fair playing field. Instead, I learned that bigger stakes attracted bigger thieves.

Almost everybody on this planet has the brain power to make money in the stock market. The question is whether you have the stomach for it and whether you're willing to do a little bit of work? Those are the key elements.

You never can predict the economy. You can't predict the stock market.

You lose money fast in the stock market. You can't make it fast.

We deceive ourselves when we believe that past stock market return patterns provide the bounds by which we can predict the future.

We don't buy and sell stocks based upon what other people think the stock market is going to do (I never have an opinion) but rather upon what we think the company is going to do.

The course of the stock market will determine, to a great degree, when we will be right, but the accuracy of our analysis of the company will largely determine whether we will be right. In other words, we tend to concentrate on what should happen, not when it should happen.

Any form of hyper-activity with large amounts of money in securities markets can create problems for all participants.

While majority opinion can give any market movement considerable momentum that keeps it going in the same direction, majority opinion is inevitably and consistently wrong at turning points.

The history of the stock market shows many periods of twenty years or more when stock prices ended up precisely where they began.

I've been involved in the market too long to get excited.

When the price of a stock can be influenced by a "herd" on Wall Street with prices set at the margin by the most emotional person, or the greediest person, or the most depressed person, it is hard to argue that the market always prices rationally. In fact, market prices are frequently nonsensical.

In the stock market, you don’t base your decisions on what the markets are doing, but on what you think is rational.

We learned in the '20s that markets with participants playing heavily on margins could be more dangerous than markets where people are dealing in cash.

The disadvantage of being in any kind of a market type environment - Wall Street would be the extreme - is that you get over-stimulated. You think you have to do something every day.

Financial markets are a kind of time machine that allows selling investors to compress the future into the present and buying investors to stretch the present into the future.

The whole institutional structure of the marketplace rests on the assumption that the other side of the trade will always be there; without that assumption, even the gutsiest of market-makers would refuse to stay in business.

In my opinion, the market tells you when to buy things. And when things are really cheap, on a Graham and Dodd valuation basis, you should like them more. And when they’re really expensive, you should like them less.

Prices change when events are different from what the market has expected them to be.

Discrepancies -- and hence opportunities -- in securities originate most often when events move faster than quotations.

Most people who have been really successful in the securities markets say the same thing -- that they're not smart enough to get into the market and out of it. So they tend to remain more or less in the market at all times.

You want to design a portfolio that will make the members of a household as happy as possible, but the problem is that people aren't very good at anticipating how they're going to react to various market outcomes.

If you think of the stock market as a cauldron of minestrone soup that occasionally somebody sticks a ladle in and stirs up, it takes a while before all the vegetables float back to the level that they were at before.

The prevailing view has been that the market will earn a high rate of return if the holding period is long enough, but entry point is what really matters.

If the stock market has a period of outperformance of its long-term return, it is inevitably followed by some period of underperformance. But people being optimistic and greedy by nature take the recent short-term outperformance of stocks as a sign of good things to come, rather than a warning of bad things to come.

I am certainly not going to predict what general business or the stock market are going to do in the next year or two since I don't have the faintest idea.

It would be silly to expect every bear market to turn into the Great Depression. It would be equally wrong to expect that a fall from overvalued, to more fairly valued, couldn't badly overshoot on the downside.

Market inefficiencies, like tax selling and window dressing, also create mindless selling, as can the deletion of a stock from an index. These causes of mispricing are deep-rooted in human behavior and market structure, unlikely to be extinguished anytime soon.

It is crucial to have a strategy in place before problems hit, precisely because no one can accurately predict the future direction of the stock market or economy.

The daily blips of the market are, in fact, noise -- noise that is very difficult for most investors to tune out.

The tendency of investors to follow the market's momentum and bet on whatever has worked recently is accompanied by antipathy to whatever hasn't.

Stock market efficiency is an elegant hypothesis that bears quite limited resemblance to the real world.

There is always a tension in the financial markets between greed and fear.

If the market's going wild and you want to be in it, you either have to lower your standards to stay in the game or you buy stuff which may not participate because it's not part of the game at that time.

A lot of my stocks don't work. The beauty of the stock market is that if you are wrong, if you put $1,000 up, all you lose is $1,000. I have proven that many times.

The market at this point is institutional and we all act like a herd.

If you're in the market, you have to know there's going to be declines.

If you looked at September 1986 to October '87, the market was unchanged. It had a thousand points up and a thousand points down and they only remember the down.

For some reason, you lose money rapidly in the stock market but don't make it rapidly.

You can lose money very fast, in two months, but you very rarely make money very fast in the stock market. When I look back, my great stocks took a long time to work out.

Volatility gets you in the gut. There's no question that when prices are jumping around, you feel different from when they're stable.

Markets are shaped by what I call "memory banks." Experience shapes memory; memory shapes our view of the future.

What other people are doing in the market is not relevant to what you’re doing.

I can't say enough about the fact that earnings are the key to success in investing in stocks. No matter what happens to the market, the earnings will determine the results.

The novice soon learns that stocks are likely to maintain an upward or downward trend for long periods of time with minor interruptions of the major trend.

One point movements may be likened to the ripples of the stock market, whose occurrence may be influenced by so great a multitude of factors that it is impossible to forecast them. Ten-point movements may perhaps be compared to waves.

Anomalies are always to be found in the business situation.

People who exit the stock market to avoid a decline are odds-on favorites to miss the next rally.

What makes stocks valuable in the long run isn't "the market." It's the profitability of the shares in the companies you own.

You need to know the market's going to go down sometimes. If you're not ready for that, you shouldn't own stocks. And it's good when it happens.

Behind all the smoke and noise on the market's surface, it's important to remember that companies -- small, medium, and large -- make up the market's backbone. And corporate earnings drive stock prices.

What I do know about the stock market is that it looks forward.

Most useful and most dangerous are the stock market averages, most useful in revealing the general trend of the market, most dangerous if they mislead the trader into forgetting that, after all, his profits depend on the movements of the individual stocks in which he deals.

Fashions play their part in the stock market as in other affairs of life.

The stock market itself seems to be mainly driven by fashions and fads. However, when you look at individual stocks, it’s a different story, because individual stocks are much more diverse, and some of them can be predicted to perform well over the long run.

People say the market is overvalued, but if you are only looking at certain names, you will always find times when those names are undervalued. That's what we're waiting for.

In point of fact, all sorts of considerations enter into the market valuation which are in no way relevant to the prospective yield.

Day-to-day fluctuations in the profits of existing investments, which are obviously of an ephemeral and non-significant character, tend to have an altogether excessive, and even an absurd, influence on the market.

In all my 60 years in the stock market, I never found anyone whose opinion of what the stock market would do next week or next month was worth heeding.

The successful purchase of growth stocks requires two rather obvious conditions: First, that their prospect of growth be realized; and, second, that the market has not already pretty well discounted these growth prospects.

The problem is not whether price changes should be disregarded -- because clearly they should not be -- but rather in what way can the investor and the security analyst deal intelligently with the price changes which take place.

The trouble with market forecasting is not that it is done by unintelligent and unskillful people. Quite to the contrary, the trouble is that it is done by so many really expert people that their efforts constantly neutralize each other, and end up almost exactly in zero.

The strange revolutions wrought by time are nowhere so evident as in the securities market, where an accurate comparison of the present with the past is afforded by the price record over a period of years.

The market may be crazy, but that doesn't make you a psychiatrist.

Booms start with some tie-in to reality, some reason which justifies the increase in asset values, and then -- and this is the critical feature of speculative mood -- the market loses touch with reality.

If we really knew what the future will bring that is all we would have to know; but since stock market people can only guess the future and since they have the embarrassing habit of guessing wrongly, it seems best not to lay too much stress upon forecasts.

Participation in the stock market is not limited to the experienced, the conservative, nor even the intelligent. It is a game at which any number of people may play. And as the market level rises, the quantity of players grows rapidly and their quality diminishes somewhat in proportion.

The only significance of stock market gyrations to the true investor is that they give him an opportunity to buy good common stocks when they are cheap -- or at least reasonably priced -- and at times offer him an invitation to sell out at temptingly high levels.

In the halcyon days of prosperity, the investor is satisfied with increased dividends and a rising market, and cares very little about dry statistics.

The idea of measuring investment risks by price fluctuations is repugnant to me, for the very reason that it confuses what the stock market says with what actually happens to the owners' stake in the business.

To establish the right price for a stock the market must have adequate information, but it by no means follows that if the market has this information it will thereupon establish the right price.

I deny emphatically that because the market has all the information it needs to establish a correct price the prices it actually registers are in fact correct.

People without experience or superior ability may make a lot of money fast in the stock market, but they cannot keep what they make, and most of them will end up as net losers.

Investors feelings and reactions regarding inflation are probably more the result of the stock market action that they have recently experienced than the cause of it.

It is interesting to see how unpopular companies can become, merely because their immediate prospects are clouded in the speculative mind.

The obvious fact about security prices to any student of the market is that they fluctuate.

The official who keeps one eye on his business and one on the stock market is not likely long to be numbered among the leaders.

There is evidence that the stock market is more efficient in processing information about what other investors are doing than it is in processing fundamental information about the underlying assets, which is why stock prices so often turn out with hindsight to have been crazy rather than rational.

People spend an unbelievable amount of mental energy trying to pick what the market's going to do, what time of the year to buy it. It's just not worth it.

I have lost a lot of money in some bad savings and loans. I have lost money in bad banks. And I have lost money in electronics companies. It is very easy to lose money in the stock market.

Short sellers are the market’s police officers. If short selling were to go away, the market would levitate even more than it currently does.

People who have made money in the stock market usually bought companies that have done well over time.

Even in good markets we have declines and trying to predict its direction over the near term is an exercise in futility.

It would be very useful to know what the market is going to do. But unfortunately, of all the market corrections that have ever come, no one has been able to predict them.

It's liquidity that moves markets.

The problem with the markets is that they are just like people, and individual investors can easily get confused.

I would like to see more volatility in the markets. Small shocks remind us that a bigger shock might occur. And, we protect ourselves to some extent.

The stock market does have a life of its own.

The market's very emotional but over time, doing something logical and systematic does work. The market eventually gets it right.

The market doesn't know everything, but it doesn't know nothing, and knowledge is cumulative. The market knows stuff now that it didn't know forty years ago, so it's harder to outperform.

Mathematics is ordinarily considered as producing precise and dependable results; but in the stock market the more elaborate and abstruse the mathematics the more uncertain and speculative are the conclusions we draw therefrom.

We know from experience that eventually the market catches up with value. It realizes it in one way or another.

If you’re going to be in this game for the long pull, which is the way to do it, you better be able to handle a 50% decline without fussing too much about it.

There are inefficiencies in the market, but they're not easy to demonstrate, and I think that needs to be done before one shifts money in that direction.

The mistake most people make is answering the door just because Mr. Market knocks. You don't have to let him in.

If you go to the stock market because you want excitement, then sooner or later you will lose.

Be skeptical of the popular reasoning behind any spectacular move in the stock market -- but don't be too sure this reasoning is wrong.

The stock market registers the judgments of multitudes of buyers and sellers about the many factors which affect business -- what business is like today; what it will be like in the future.

The impression has built up that the stock market is the cause of booms and busts. Actually, it is the thermometer -- not the fever.

No one, not even the most experienced trader, economist or businessman can predict with certainty the course of the stock market.

Experience shows that when really cheap issues are scarce the general market is high; but we do not present this as an infallible principle.

The stock market has a 100% record, in the last 50 years, of predicting upturns in the economy. It's never been wrong. It's less than 50-50 on a downturn.

My experience leads me to predict that the action of the market will govern the investor's choice as to probable future growth rates, rather than vice-versa.

The single most important thing to me in the stock market for anyone is to know what you own.