Although many of the investing quotes we’re going to list come from the most brilliant financial minds in stock market history, the ideas behind them are actually quite simple to understand and apply.
But before you start reading them, I’d like to begin with a line from Tony Robbins that opens the article perfectly: “I love quotes… but in the end, knowledge has to be turned into action, or else it’s useless.” So if you’re thinking of getting into investing, I just want to remind you that sometimes the best investment advice can be found in a few lines spoken by some Wall Street “old-timer”.
Quotes from the best investors of all time
1. Don’t buy out of optimism; buy on the strength of arithmetic. – Benjamin Graham
2. Try to go through each day aiming to be a bit wiser than you were when you woke up. – Charlie Munger
3. The urge to be invested all the time is usually the first flaw we need to fix as investors. – Robert Olstein
4. On the stock market, you make money by discounting what’s obvious and betting on what nobody expects. – George Soros
5. If we buy a company as a business and not as a stock speculation, it becomes something personal. And I want it to be personal. – Phil Town
6. Risk stems from not knowing what you are doing. – Warren Buffett
7. Investing in knowledge pays the highest interest. – Benjamin Franklin
Because when it comes to investing, the most profitable investment is the one you make in yourself, in your own training.
8. No pilot, however wise, experienced and talented, ever skips the checklist. – Charlie Munger
9. People who can’t keep their emotions in check aren’t cut out for making money by investing. – Benjamin Graham
10. You can’t get a better return than most people unless you do something different from what most people do. – John Templeton
11. The secret to investing successfully is to work out what something is worth and then pay much less for it. – Joel Greenblatt
12. Behind every share you buy there’s a company. Find out what that company is up to. – Peter Lynch
13. How many millionaires do you know who got rich by keeping their money in a savings account? Exactly. Not much more to say. – Robert G. Allen
There’s nothing wrong with putting money in a savings account. It’s a way of keeping risk to an absolute minimum. The only problem is that people who cut their risk to zero also cut their chances of getting rich to zero.
14. Broad diversification is needed when investors don’t know what they’re doing. – Warren Buffett
15. Going by my own personal experience, both as an investor in recent years and as an expert onlooker in years gone by, good investors seldom weigh more than three or four variables when they invest. Everything else is noise. – Martin Whitman
16. Compound interest is the eighth wonder of the world. Whoever understands it earns it; whoever doesn’t, pays it. – Albert Einstein
17. I’ll tell you how to win on the stock market. Shut the doors. Be afraid when everyone is greedy, and be greedy when everyone else is afraid. – Warren Buffett
18. An individual should always behave as an investor, never as a speculator. – Benjamin Graham
19. When it comes to investing in the stock market, your entry strategy always matters far more than your exit strategy. – Edward Lampert
More quotes on stock market investing
20. Bull markets are born amid pessimism, grow up amid skepticism, mature amid optimism and die amid euphoria. – John Templeton
21. Most investors want to do today what they ought to have done yesterday. – Lawrence H. Summers
22. The best company you could invest in may well be one you already hold in your portfolio. – Peter Lynch
23. If investing entertains you, if you’re enjoying yourself, you’re probably not making any money. Good investments are dull. – George Soros
24. The four words that have ruined more investors than any others: “This time is different.” – John Templeton
25. Mr. Market is schizophrenic in the short run, but he gets his sanity back in the long run. – Benjamin Graham
26. Investing ought to feel more like watching paint dry or grass grow. If you’re after excitement, take $800 and head to a casino. – Paul Samuelson
People who treat investing as if it were gambling end up losing money. Treat the market like a prostitute and it will end up giving you a venereal disease. These days plenty of people have an interest in getting you to trade, but remember that trading won’t make you rich, although your trading will help others buy themselves a yacht.
27. In many ways the stock market is like the weather. If you don’t like the current conditions for doing something, all you need to do is wait a while. Some people insist on going skiing when there’s no snow. – Low Simpson
See also: 50 business quotes for entrepreneurs
28. Being able to focus your attention only on what matters is a defining trait of intelligence. – Robert J. Shiller
29. Fast-changing industries are the investor’s enemy. – Mohnish Pabrai
30. The stock market is full of people who know the price of everything but the value of nothing. – Philip Fisher
See also: The world’s most successful people share their best advice about money
31. All smart investing is value investing: acquiring more than you pay for. To value the share, you have to value the business. – Charlie Munger
32. An investor’s problem isn’t what he doesn’t know but what he thinks he knows when he’s actually wrong. – George Soros
33. The stock market is a mechanism for moving money from impatient investors to more patient ones. – Warren Buffett
34. When it comes to investing, we want our money to grow at the highest possible rates of return with the lowest possible risk. There are no shortcuts to getting rich on the stock market, but there are smart ways to go about it. – Phil Town
35. An investor’s worst enemy is probably himself. – Benjamin Graham
36. An investor should behave as if he had a card allowing only 20 buying decisions for his whole life. – Warren Buffett
37. An investor who loses his ability to reason when he makes his first ten thousand dollars ends up as a puppet, easily manipulated. – André Kostolany
38. Even the intelligent investor will need considerable willpower to stop following the crowd. – Benjamin Graham
39. October is one of the especially dangerous months for speculating in stocks. The others are July, January, September, April, November, May, March, June, December, August and February. – Mark Twain
40. I see investing as a way of buying assets to earn a return in the form of reasonably predictable income (dividends, interest) and/or long-term appreciation. – Burton G. Malkiel
Bonus: investor quotes explained
41. Jack Bogle: losses are a fact of market life
“If a 20% loss on the stock market can cost you sleep, affect your health or dent your self-image, maybe investing in shares isn’t for you.”
Even the best investors have had their big fiascos on the stock market. At some point it could happen: a loss of 20%, 50% or the whole investment. The risk is always there, and at some point it can materialize in any listed company, even the one we least expect. Once you’re able to accept that risk, however unlikely, you’re ready to invest.
42. Bob Farrell: don’t be part of the herd
“The public tends to buy more near a stock’s top than near its bottom. That’s why, when all the experts agree in their recommendations and forecasts, something is about to happen, and it won’t be what we expect.”
We’ve already explained why investors buy and sell shares at the worst possible moment, which is the mother of all stock market investing mistakes.
43. John Templeton: don’t forget about taxes
“For every long-term investor there should be only one goal: the maximum total real return after taxes.”
We sometimes forget that taxes have to come out of our gains. That’s why you need to keep up with tax rules: sometimes it’s better to watch a share fall than to sell it at a time when you’d have to pay more tax.
44. Barton Biggs: no analysis or equation always works
“Investments based on quantitative terms, chart analysis and asset allocation equations invariably fail, because they’re designed to capture what a stock did in the previous cycle, while the next cycle is still a riddle wrapped in an enigma.”
It’s his own way of telling us that technical analysis fails. Even if it’s shown to work in the short term, if you’re investing for the long term, technical analysis is no use whatsoever.
45. Peter Lynch: do your homework before investing
“Investing without doing any research is like playing poker without ever looking at your cards.”
Before buying shares in a company for the long term, we need to know the company’s track record, how its results have evolved, its advantages in the market, its problems, its possible plans for the future, its manager, the difficulties in the market now and in the foreseeable future… EVERYTHING.
And I’ll finish with a quote I don’t know who to attribute to, but which perfectly sums up the biggest mistake we make when investing in any asset:
“What the wise man does at the beginning, the fool does at the end.”
See also: The best stock market and finance books of all time
Featured image: Gotfryd, Bernard, photographer, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
