| Step |
Quotations |
Author
|
Source or Publication
|
Year
|
| 1 Active Investors | "The investor's chief problem - and even his worst enemy - is likely to be himself" | Graham, Benjamin(1894-1976) Legendary American investor, scholar, teacher and co-author of the 1934 classic, Security Analysis | | Security Analysis | 1934 |
| 1 Active Investors | "Most investors are pretty smart. Yet most investors also remain heavily invested in actively managed stock funds. This is puzzling. The temptation, of course, is to dismiss these folks as ignorant fools. But I suspect these folks know the odds are stacked against them, and yet they are more than happy to take their chances." | Clements, Jonathan, Journalist | | The Wall Street Journal issue of February 27, 2001 | 2001 |
| 1 Active Investors | "Properly measured, the average actively managed dollar must underperform the average passively managed dollar, net of costs. Empirical analyses that appear to refute this principle are guilty of improper measurement." | William F. Sharpe, Nobel Laureate in Economics, 1990 | | The
Arithmetic of Active Management, The Financial Analysts' Journal Vol. 47,
No. 1, January/February 1991. pp. 7-9 | 1991 |
| 1 Active Investors | "The results of this study are not good news for investors who purchase actively managed mutual funds. No investment style generates positive abnormal returns over the 1965-1998 sample period. The sample includes 4,686 funds covering 26,564 fund-years." | Davis, James L. | | Mutual Fund Performance and Manger Style, Financial Analysts Journal 57 (2001): 19-27 | 2001 |
| 1 Active Investors | "The deeper one delves, the worse things look for actively managed funds." | Bernstein, William | | The
Intelligent Asset Allocator | 2001 |
| 1 Active Investors | 4. "The sheer magnitude of the difference we discovered between the total returns earned by funds and the results captured by the average shareholder is shocking and tragic." [Funds = 5.7%, Investors = 1%] | Charles Trzcinka, Professor of Finance, Indiana University | | What Fund Investors Really Need to Know, by Jazon Zweig Money Magazine,
June 2002. (see 1.3.3) | 2002 |
| 1 Active Investors | [Most investors would] be better off in an index fund. | Peter Lynch, famous stock picker | | Barron's, p. 15, April 2, 1990 | 1990 |
| 1 Active Investors | "..the best way to own common stocks is through an index fund..." | Buffet, Warren | | Berkshire
Hathaway Inc. 1996 Shareholder Letter | 1997 |
| 1 Active Investors | "Most of the mutual fund investments I have are index funds, approximately 75%." | Charles R. Schwab, author | | Guide to Financial Independence, p. 90 | 2000 |
| 1 Active Investors | "Rather than making money, 240 pension funds lost about 0.5% per year on average, over the last five years through their active management activities." | The Ambachtsheer Letter | | The Ambachtsheer Letter | 1998, Sept. 28, |
| 1 Active Investors | "The road to financial perdition begins with a call to your broker who claims to be able to 'beat the markets.'" | Daniel R. Solin | | Author of Does Your Broker Owe You Money? (Perigee Books, 2006) and The Smartest Investment Book You'll Ever Read. (Perigee Books, 2006) | |
| 1 Active Investors | "If the data do not prove that indexing wins, well, the data are wrong." | John C. Bogle | | The Little Book of Common Sense Investing, p. 28 | 2007 |
| 1 Active Investors | "Hint: money flows into most funds after good performance, and goes out when bad performance follows." | John C. Bogle | | The Little Book of Common Sense Investing, p. 50 | 2007 |
| 1 Active Investors | "The investor with a portfolio of sound stocks should expect their prices to fluctuate and should neither be concerned by sizable declines nor become excited by sizable advances. He should always remember that market quotations are there for his convenience, either to be taken advantage of or to be ignored. | Benjamin Graham, The Intelligent Investor, 1949 | | John C. Bogle, The Little Book on Common Sense Investing | 2007 |
| 1 Active Investors | "the neural activity of someone whose investments are making money is indistinguishable from that of someone who is high on cocaine or morphine" | Jason Zweig | | Your Money & Your Brain | 2007 |
| 1 Active Investors | "Wall Street, with its army of brokers, analysts, and advisers funneling trillions of dollars into mutual funds, hedge funds, and private equity funds, is an elaborate fraud." | Michael Lewis | | Conde Nast Portfolio, The Evolution of an Investor, December 2007, page 184 | 2007 |
| 1 Active Investors | "It's not that stock prices are capricious. It's that the news is capricious." | Burton Malkiel, Princeton Professor of Economics and author of A Random Walk Down Wall Street | | A Random Walk Down Wall Street | |
| 1 Active Investors | "The American economy is going to do fine. But it won't do fine every year and every week and every month. I mean, if you don't believe that, forget about buying stocks anyway... It's a positive-sum game, long term. And the only way an investor can get killed is by high fees or by trying to outsmart the market." | Warren Buffett | | Fortune Magazine, "What Warren Thinks..." April 14, 2008 | 2008 |
| 1 Active Investors | "the active investors will have their returns diminished by a far greater percentage than will their inactive brethren. That means that the passive group – the “know-nothings” – must win." | Warren Buffett | | 2007 Berkshire Hathaway Shareholder Letter | 2007 |
| 1 Active Investors | "When a shareholder asked for the single best specific investment idea Buffett could recommend to an individual in his 30s, Buffett said: "I would just have it all in a very low-cost index fund from a reputable firm, maybe Vanguard. | Jason Zweig, quoting Warren Buffett | | CNNMoney.com, May 5, 2008 -About the Berkshire Hathaway 2008 Shareholder Meeting
| 2008 |
| 2 Nobel Laureates | "Prediction is very difficult, especially if it's about the future." | Nils Bohr, Nobel laureate in Physics | | | |
| 2 Nobel Laureates | "This message (that attempting to beat the market is futile) can never be sold on Wall Street because it is in effect telling stock analysts to drop dead." | Paul Samuelson, Ph.D., Nobel Prize laureate | | | |
| 2 Nobel Laureates | "A Copernican Revolution . . .the most fundamental thing that has happened to the investment process - the development of Modern Portfolio Theory, the Theory of Efficient Markets, the scientific understanding of risk/return relationships and the importance of diversification in portfolios" | Langbein, John H. , Chancellor Kent Professor of Law and Legal History at Yale University Law School Reporter, | | The Uniform Prudent Investor Act | - |
| 2 Nobel Laureates | "It is not easy to get rich in Las Vegas, at Churchill Downs or at the local Merrill Lynch office." | Samuelson, Paul A. , Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Economist, Nobel Laureate in Economics | | - | 1970 |
| 2 Nobel Laureates | Q. So investors shouldn't delude themselves about beating the market? A. "They're just not going to do it. It's just not going to happen." | Daniel Kahneman, Nobel Laureate in Economics, 2002 | | Investors
Can't Beat Market, Jan 2, 2002 | 2002 |
| 2 Nobel Laureates | "One can resist the invasion of armies, but not the invasion of ideas." | Victor Hugo, French Poet (1802-1885) | | - | 1880 |
| 2 Nobel Laureates | "It is remarkable that a science which began with the consideration of games of chance should have become the most important object of human knowledge." | Marquis de Laplace, Theorie Analytique des Probabilites | | Lady Luck, the theory of probability by Warren Weaver | 1812 |
| 3 Stock Pickers | "I have been a stockbroker for 5 yrs and have made people money, but I always lose it in the end. I have taken huge risks with my clients, I have lost millions, but I am tired of looking for new clients." | Anonymous Stock Broker | | Online Chat, ifa.com | 2001, Sept. |
| 3 Stock Pickers | “If there's 10,000 people looking at the stocks and trying to pick winners, one in 10,000 is going to score, by chance alone, a great coup, and that's all that's going on. It's a game, it's a chance operation, and people think they are doing something purposeful... but they're really not.” | Miller, Merton Nobel Laureate and Professor of Economics, Univ. of Chicago | | Transcript of the PBS Nova Special, The Trillion Dollar Bet | 2000 |
| 3 Stock Pickers | "The economists arrived at a devastating conclusion: it seemed just as plausible to attribute the success of top traders to sheer luck, rather than skill." | Announcer | | Transcript of the PBS Nova Special, The Trillion Dollar Bet | 2000 |
| 3 Stock Pickers | "It's human nature to find patterns where there are none and to find skill where luck is a more likely explanation (particularly if you're the lucky [mutual fund] manager)." Mutual fund manager performance does not persist and the return of stock picking is zero." | Bernstein, William | | The Intelligent Asset Allocator | 2001 |
| 3 Stock Pickers | "It's just not true that you can't beat the market. Every year about one-third of the fund managers do it. Of course, each year it is a different group." | Stovall, Robert , Investment Manager | | ABC 20/20 Interview "Who Needs the Experts" | 1992 |
| 3 Stock Pickers | "The difference between luck and skill is seldom apparent at first glance" | Bernstein, Peter L. | | Capital
Ideas, The Improbable Origins of Modern Wall Street | 1996 |
| 3 Stock Pickers | 11. [There is] "no support for the claim that active management of small-cap portfolios is more fruitful than it is for large-cap portfolios." , | Richard M. Ennis | | The Small-Cap-Alpha Myth | 2001, Sept |
| 3 Stock Pickers | "The implication [of the Efficient Market Hypothesis] for the investor is that it is almost impossible to "beat the market." | | | 12th Grade Economics Text Book, Economics, (even our kids are learning this) | 2000 |
| 3 Stock Pickers | The house [casino] takes a cut on each spin of the wheel, paying out less in winnings than it collects in bets. So roulette is a negative-sum game, and so is your non-index mutual fund [actively managed fund]. | Meir Statman | | Odds say you can't beat index funds, MoneyCentral Investing, May 29, 2001 | 2001 |
| 3 Stock Pickers | "Investment managers sell for the price of a Picasso [what] routinely turns out to be paint-by-number sofa art." | Dunn, Patricia C., CEO, Barclays Global Advisors | | CEO of world's largest money management firm, approx $1 trillion of assets under management, approx 80% indexed) | 2001 |
| 3 Stock Pickers | "After taking risk into account, do more managers than you'd see by chance outperform with persistence? Virtually every economist who studied this question answers with a resounding "no." Mike Jensen in the Sixties and Mark Carhart in the Nineties both conducted exhaustive studies of professional investors. They each conclude that in general, a manager's fee, and not his skill, plays the biggest role in performance." | Fama, Jr, Eugene, DFA | | Markets Don't Have to Be Right to Be Efficient | 2001 |
| 3 Stock Pickers | "Speculation is an effort, probably unsuccessful, to turn a little money into a lot. Investment is an effort, which should be successful, to prevent a lot of money from becoming a little." | Schwed, Fred Jr. | | Where Are The Customer’s Yachts? | 1940 |
| 3 Stock Pickers | "99% of fund managers demonstrate no evidence of skill whatsoever." | Bernstein, William | | The
Intelligent Asset Allocator | 2001 |
| 3 Stock Pickers | "It’s hard to find ideas that aren’t picked over and harder to get real returns and differentiate yourself. We are entering a new environment. The days of big returns are gone." | Steven Cohen, Founder of Hedge Fund SAC Capital Advisors | | The Hedge Fund King is Getting Nervous, The Wall Street Journal | September 16, 2006 |
| 3 Stock Pickers | "It's amazing how difficult it is for a man to understand something if he's paid a small fortune not to understand it." | John C. Bogle | | The Little Book of Common Sense Investing | 2007 |
| 3 Stock Pickers | " If your fund doesn't last for the long term, how can you invest for the long term?" Note: over 36 years, 80% of the original 355 funds went out of existence. | John C. Bogle | | The Little Book of Common Sense Investing p. 79-80 | 2007 |
| 3 Stock Pickers | "Having been an idealistic young sales-oriented fellow I became a licensed stockbroker for one of Wall Street's most prestigious firms in the late 60s. I learned very quickly that to succeed I had to "sell my soul", and to be more than moderately successful I had to follow the boss' program and to sell exactly what the boss wants sold - - it was "the hell with the client".
... kudos for having the intestinal fortitude at PORTFOLIO [magazine] to speak out about the 'sacred cows' that graze along Wall Street!" | Peter Magurean III | | The Evolution of an Investor, Conde Nast Portfolio.com - Reader Comments | Nov. 20, 2007 |
| 3 Stock Pickers | Nobody knows which company will prove a good long-term investment. Even Buffett's genius lies more in running businesses than in picking stocks. But in the investing world, that is ignored. Wall Street, with its army of brokers, analysts, and advisers funneling trillions of dollars into mutual funds, hedge funds and private equity funds, is an elaborate fraud." | Michael Lewis | | "The Evolution of an Investor", Conde Naste Portfolio, December 2007 | |
| 3 Stock Pickers | "Buy a cross section of American industry, and if a cross section of American industry doesn't work, certainly trying to pick the little beauties here and there isn't going to work either." | Warren Buffett | | Fortune Magazine, "What Warren Thinks..." April 14, 2008 | 2008 |
| 3 Stock Pickers | "Investors...can't pick stocks that are better than average. Stocks are a good thing to own over time. There's only two things you can do wrong: You can buy the wrong ones, and you can buy or sell them at the wrong time. And the truth is you never need to sell them". | Warren Buffett | | Fortune Magazine, "What Warren Thinks..." April 14, 2008 | 2008 |
| 4 Time Pickers | "Investors should remember that excitement and expenses are their enemies. And if they insist on trying to time their participation in equities, they should try to be fearful when others are greedy and greedy when others are fearful." | Warren Buffett | | 2004 Annual Report of Berkshire Hathaway | 2004 |
| 4 Time Pickers | "Inactivity strikes us as intelligent behavior." | Warren Buffett | | 1996 Annual Report of Berkshire Hathaway | 1996 |
| 4 Time Pickers | "Our favorite holding period is forever." | Warren Buffett | | 1988 Annual Report of Berkshire Hathaway | 1988 |
| 4 Time Pickers | "The only value of stock forecasters is to make fortune-tellers look good." | Warren Buffett | | 1992 Annual Report of Berkshire Hathaway | 1992 |
| 4 Time Pickers | "We continue to make more money when snoring than when active." | Warren Buffett | | 1996 Annual Report of Berkshire Hathaway | 1996 |
| 4 Time Pickers | "Our stay-put behavior reflects our view that the stock market serves as a relocation center at which money is moved from the active to the patient." | Warren Buffett | | 1991 Annual Report of Berkshire Hathaway | 1991 |
| 4 Time Pickers | "If you knew what was going to happen in the economy, you still wouldn't necessarily know what was going to happen in the stock market." | Warren Buffett | | Fortune Magazine, "What Warren Thinks..." April 14, 2008 | 2008 |
| 4 Time Pickers | "The time is always right to do the right thing." | Martin Luther King, Jr. | | Money Magazine | 2007 Sept. |
| 4 Time Pickers | "There is no other proposition in economics that has more solid empirical evidence supporting it than the Efficient Market Hypothesis...In the literature of finance, accounting, and the economics of uncertainty, the EMH is accepted as a fact of life." | Michael C. Jensen | | “Some Anomalous Evidence Regarding Market Efficiency,” Journal of Financial Economics | 1978 |
| 4 Time Pickers | "He who lives by the crystal ball soon learns to eat ground glass." | Edgar R. Fiedler | | The Three Rs of Economic Forecasting-Irrational, Irrelevant and Irreverent | June 1977 |
| 4 Time Pickers | "Those who have knowledge, don't predict. Those who predict, don't have knowledge. " | Lao Tzu, 6th Century BC Chinese Poet | | | |
| 4 Time Pickers | "If I have noticed anything over these 60 years on Wall Street, it is that people do not succeed in forecasting what`s going to happen to the stock market." | Benjamin Graham, Legendary investor and author | | Security Analysis | 1934 classic |
| 4 Time Pickers | "The market is like watching a drunk walk a tight rope. You never know what's going to happen next." | Arthur Cashin, CNBC Commentary | | CNBC Television | 21-Nov-03 |
| 4 Time Pickers | "Market Timing is a wicked idea. Don't try it --- ever." | Ellis,Charles D. | | Winning the Loser's Game | 1985, 1999 |
| 4 Time Pickers | "Market Timing: A Perilous Ploy" - | Laderman, Jeffrey M. | | Headline from Business
Week | 1998, March 9 |
| 4 Time Pickers | "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. Then again, there is a third type of investor - the investment professional, who indeed knows that he or she doesn't know, but whose livelihood depends upon appearing to know." | Bernstein, William | | The
Intelligent Asset Allocator | 2001 |
| 4 Time Pickers | ... most [stock pickers and market timers] should go out of business - take up plumbing, teach Greek... | Paul A. Samuelson, Nobel Laureate | | "Challenge to Judgement" The Journal of Portfolio Management, Fall 1974, p. 17-19 | 1974 |
| 4 Time Pickers | "By day we write about "Six Funds to Buy NOW!"... By night, we invest in sensible index funds. Unfortunately, pro-index fund stories don't sell magazines." | Anonymous Fortune Magazine Writer | | Fortune, April 26, 1999 | 1999 |
| 4 Time Pickers | "Why does indexing outmaneuver the best minds on Wall Street? Paradoxically, it is because the best and brightest in the financial community have made the stock market very efficient. When information arises about individual stocks or the market as a whole, it gets reflected in stock prices without delay, making one stock as reasonably priced as another. Active managers who frequently shift from security to security actually detract from performance [compared to an index fund] by incurring transaction costs." | Burton G. Malkiel, author of A Random Walk Down Wall Street | | The Wall Street Journal | - |
| 4 Time Pickers | "IN THE STOCK MARKET (as in much of life), the beginning of wisdom is admitting your ignorance. One of the many things you cannot know about stocks is exactly when they will up or go down. Over the long term, stocks generally rise at a nice pace. History shows they double in value every seven years or so. But in the short term, stocks are just plain wild. Over periods of days, weeks and months, no one has any idea what they will do. Still, nearly all investors think they are smart enough to divine such short-term movements. This hubris frequently gets them into trouble." | James K. Glassman, Co-Author of Dow 36,000 | | Attempts to Time the Market Always Leave the Investor Out of Sync, 11/12/2001 | 2001 |
| 5 Manager Pickers | "All the time and effort people devote to picking the right fund, the hot hand, the great manager have, in most cases, led to no advantage." and "Most individual investors would be better off in an index mutual fund." | Peter Lynch | | Beat the Street", Simon and Schuster, 1993, p. 60, still looking for "index
fund" source. and Barron's, p. 15, April 2, 1990 | 1993, 1990 |
| 5 Manager Pickers | Most fund managers don't beat the S&P 500. Or if they do, very few can keep doing it for long spells. When bear markets wreak their periodic havoc, even fewer funds remain moneymakers. | 2002 Mutual Funds Guide, First three sentences. (Why read on?) | | Forbes Magazine, Feb. 4, 2002 | 2002 |
| 5 Manager Pickers | "Contrary to their oft articulated goal of outperforming the market averages, investment managers are not beating the market; the market is beating them." | Charles D. Ellis | | The Loser's Game," Financial Analysts Journal, (July-Aug 1975 | 1975 |
| 5 Manager Pickers | Gee Beav, those stock pickers and market timers really do add value to your portfolio. | Eddie Haskel. Leave it to Beaver | | "Tall Tales" | circa 1965 |
| 5 Manager Pickers | People exaggerate their own skills. They are overoptimistic about their prospects and overconfident about their guesses, including which [investment] managers to pick. | Professor Richard Thaler, University of Chicago | | Investment Titans, by Jonathan Burton, McGraw-Hill, 2001 | 2001 |
| 5 Manager Pickers | "... skepticism about past returns is crucial. The truth is, much as you may wish you could know which funds will be hot, you can't -- and neither can the legions of advisers and publications that claim they can. That's why building a portfolio around index funds isn't really settling for average. It's just refusing to believe in magic." | McLean,Bethany | | "The Skeptic's Guide to Mutual Funds," Fortune Magazine,March 15, 1999. | 1999 |
| 5 Manager Pickers | "Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny should take a few pointers from the mutual-fund industry [and it's fund managers]. All three are trying to pull off elaborate hoaxes. But while Santa and the bunny suffer the derision of eight year olds everywhere, actively-managed stock funds still have an ardent following among otherwise clear-thinking adults. This continued loyalty amazes me. Reams of statistics prove that most of the fund industry's stock pickers fail to beat the market. For instance, over the 10 years through 2001, U.S. stock funds returned 12.4% a year, vs. 12.9% for the Standard & Poor's 500 stock index." | Jonathan Clements | | Only Fools Fall in ... Managed Funds?, Wall Street Journal, September 15, 2002 | 2002 |
| 5 Manager Pickers | "Fund investors are confident that they can easily select superior fund managers. They are wrong." | John C. Bogle | | The Little Book of Common Sense Investing | 2007 |
| 5 Manager Pickers | "It is often said there are two types of forecasts ... lucky or wrong!!!!" | "Control" magazine | | published by Institute of Operations Management | |
| 5 Manager Pickers | "If the data do not prove that indexing wins, well, the data are wrong." | John C. Bogle | | The Little Book on Common Sense Investing | 2007 |
| 5 Manager Pickers | "A miniscule 4 percent of funds produce market-beating after-tax results with a scant 0.6 percent (annual) margin of gain. The 96 percent of funds that fail to meet or beat the Vanguard 500 Index Fund lose by a wealth-destroying margin of 4.8% per annum." | David Swensen, chief investment officer, Yale University Endowment Fund | | John C. Bogle, The Little Book on Common Sense Investing | 2007 |
| 5 Manager Pickers | "Nothing highlights better the continuing gap between rhetoric and substance in British financial services than the failure of providers here to emulate Jack Bogle's index fund success in the United States. Every professional in the City knows that index funds should be core building blocks in any long-term investor's portfolio. Since 1976, the Vanguard index funds has produced a compound annual return of 12 percent, better than three-quarters of its peer group. Yet, even 30 years on, ignorance and professional omerta still stand in the way of more investors enjoying the fruits of this unsung hero of the investment world." | Jonathon Davis, columnist for London's "The Spectator" | | John C. Bogle, The Little Book on Common Sense Investing | 2007 |
| 5 Manager Pickers | "A vast industry of stockbrokers, financial planners, and investment advisers skims a fortune for themselves off the top in exchange for passing their clients' money on to people who, as a whole, cannot possibly outperform the market." | Michael Lewis | | "The Evolution of an Investor", Conde Naste Portfolio, December 2007 | |
| 5 Manager Pickers | "You will almost never find a fund manager who can repeatedly beat the market. It is better to invest in an indexed fund that promises a market return but with significantly lower fees." | The Economist, July 3, 2003, "The Blame Game" | | John C. Bogle, The Little Book on Common Sense Investing | 2007 |
| 6 Style Drifters | "The avoidance of taxes is the only intellectual pursuit that carries any reward." | John Maynard Keynes | | Money Magazine | 2007 Sept. |
| 6 Style Drifters | "Style drift is a serious problem for [investors] because it distorts asset allocation and undermines performance when styles rotate. Value managers who have drifted over the past three years [1998-2000] toward more favored growth stocks are regretting those moves, but not as much as their [investors]." - | Ron Surz, President, PPCA Inc., | | Get the Drift | 2001 |
| 6 Style Drifters | "If a fund is drifting to a style that is dramatically different, your potential returns, volatility, and risk are going to change." | Pane, Rosanne | | Spotting 'Style Creep' When a fund starts to wander, returns can suffer, BusinessWeek Online | 1999, Nov. |
| 6 Style Drifters | "One thing is clear: Style drift happens to a sizable percentage of mutual funds...For [investors or] planners seeking to create portfolios tapping into consistently different equity styles, style drift presents a significant concern." | Craig L. Israelsen, Ph.D | | Drift Happens, Financial Planning Interactive | 1999, Nov. |
| 6 Style Drifters | "How do you beat the S&P 500? You beat it by overweighting some groups, underweighting others, and by owning stocks that aren't in the S&P. [i.e. style drift]... Sometimes I think if people knew how risky I was acting in the portfolio [Fidelity Magellan] they'd really be surprised. Just go back a bit -- I made AOL very big; I made Yahoo very big. I'm not afraid to make any bet." [that's scary] | Bob Stansky, Manager Fidelity Magellan Fund | | Inside the world's largest fund, by Jason Zweig, CNN/Money, | 2002, April |
| 7 Silent Partners | "None of my clients are taxable... Once you introduce taxes, active management probably has an insurmountable hurdle. We've been asked to manage taxable money -- and declined" | Aronson, Theodore of Aronson+Partners, | | Institutional Money Manager | - |
| 7 Silent Partners | "If you can eliminate the government as a 39.6% partner, then you will be much better off." | Buffett, Warren E., Chairman, Berkshire Hathaway | | - | - |
| 7 Silent Partners | "It's amazing how difficult it is for a man to understand something if he's paid a small fortune not to understand it." | John C. Bogle | | John C. Bogle, The Little Book on Common Sense Investing | 2007 |
| 7 Silent Partners | "Managed funds are astonishingly tax-inefficient." | John C. Bogle | | The Little Book of Common Sense Investing, p. 61 | 2007 |
| 7 Silent Partners | "The miracle of compounding returns is overwhelmed by the tyranny of compounding costs" | John C. Bogle | | The Little Book of Common Sense Investing | 2007 |
| 8 Riskese™ | "Index funds eliminate the risks of individual stocks, market sectors, and manager selection. Only stock market risk remains." | John C. Bogle | | The Little Book of Common Sense Investing | 2007 |
| 8 Riskese™ | "Some investments do have higher expected returns than others. Which ones? Well, by and large they're the ones that will do the worst in bad times." | William F. Sharpe | | Money Magazine | 2007, June |
| 8 Riskese™ | "It's bad enough that you have to take market risk. Only a fool takes on the additional risk of doing yet more damage by failing to diversify properly with his or her nest egg. Avoid the problem--buy a well-run index fund and own the whole market." | William Bernstein | | The Four Pillars of Investing | 2002 |
| 8 Riskese™ | "The average long-term experience in investing is never surprising, but the short term experience is always surprising. We now know to focus not on rate of return, but on the informed management of risk." | Ellis, Charles | | Investment Policy, 1985 (a must read) | 1985 |
| 8 Riskese™ | "Since the dawn of capitalism, there has been one golden rule: "If you want to make money, you have to take risks." | Announcer | | Opening line of the Nova Special, "The Trillion Dollar Bet" | 2000 |
| 8 Riskese™ | When asked what he considered man's greatest discovery, Albert Einstein replied without hesitation: "Compound interest!" | Ellis, Charles | | Investment Policy, 1985 (a must read) | |
| 8 Riskese™ | "If your broker [or investment advisor] is not familiar with the concept of standard deviation of returns, get a new one." | Bernstein, William | | The Intelligent Asset Allocator | 1985 |
| 8 Riskese™ | "Odds are you don't know what the odds are?" (contributed by Munzer Haque) | Belsky, Gary and Thomas Gilovich | | Why Smart People Make Make Big Money Mistakes | 2000 |
| 8 Riskese™ | Probably the question heard most frequently is: “How high can stocks go?” To the unsophisticated observer there appears to be no maximum price. | financial journalist | | New York Times, August 21, 1929 | 1929 |
| 8 Riskese™ | "In investing, what is comfortable is rarely profitable." | Robert Arnott | | Chariman, Research Affiliates | |
| 8 Riskese™ | Investors must keep in mind that there's a difference between a good company and a good stock. After all, you can buy a good car but pay too much for it. | Richard Thaler | | Upside, July 6, 1999 | 1999 |
| 8 Riskese™ | "Probability is the very guide of life." | Cicero | | Lady Luck, The Theory of Probability by Warren Weaver | |
| 8 Riskese™ | "The probable is what usually happens." | Aristotle | | Lady Luck, the theory of probability by Warren Weaver | |
| 8 Riskese™ | "The record of a month's roulette playing at Monte Carlo can afford us material for discussing the foundations of knowledge." | Karl Pearson | | Lady Luck, the theory of probability by Warren Weaver | |
| 8 Riskese™ | "The most important questions of life are, for the most part, really only problems of probability." | Marquis de Laplace, Theorie Analytique des Probabilites | | Lady Luck, the theory of probability by Warren Weaver | |
| 8 Riskese™ | "Statistical thinking will one day be as necessary for efficient citizenship as the ability to read and write." | H.G. Wells | | Lady Luck, the theory of probability by Warren Weaver | Pre-1963 |
| 8 Riskese™ | "Chance favors the prepared mind." | Louis Pasteur (1822 - 1895) | | | |
| 8 Riskese™ | "Modern physics uses the normal distribution to describe the movements of molecules. The motion of each individual molecule is quite disordered, and yet their overall behavior is very predictable. This disordered movement is known as random walk. The idea of random walk was actually used by Laplace and others to analyze a gambler's chances of wandering into bankruptcy. Today, the random walk is applied to many phenomena, including the stock market." | Gary Smith | | Statistical Reasoning | 1985 |
| 8 Riskese™ | "One of the most striking and fundamental things about probability theory is that it leads to an understanding of the otherwise strange fact that events which are individually capricious and unpredictable can, when treated en masse, lead to very stable average performances." | Warren Weaver | | Lady Luck, the theory of probability | 1963 |
| 9 History | "It takes between 20 and 800 years of monitoring performance to statistically prove that a money manager is skillful rather than lucky - which is a lot more than most people have in mind when they say 'long-term' [track record]." | Ted Aronson | | "Confessions of a Fund Pro", Money, Feb 1999, pp. 73-75. | 1999 |
| 9 History | "The only new thing in the world is the history you don't know." | Harry S. Truman | | | |
| 9 History | "If a man dwells on the past, then he robs the present; but if a man ignores the past, he may rob the future. The seeds of our destiny are nurtured by the roots of our past." | Master Po | | Kung Fu Television Series | 1970s |
| 9 History | "Those who are ignorant of investment history are bound to repeat it. Historical investment returns and risks of various asset classes should be studied. Investment results for an asset over a long enough period (greater than 20 years) are a good guide to the future returns and risks of that asset. Further, it should be possible to approximate the future long-term return and risk of a portfolio consisting of such assets." | William Bernstein | | The
Intelligent Asset Allocator | 2001 |
| 9 History | "The four most dangerous words in investing are, It's different this time." | Sir John Templeton, legendary investor. | | Money Magazine, Fall 2002, p. 25 | 2002 |
| 9 History | "I know of no way of judging the future but by the past." | Patrick Henry | | March 23, 1775, Virginia
Convention Speech | 1775 |
| 9 History | "Investing is a strange business. It's the only one we know of where the more expensive the products get, the more customers want to buy them." | Anthony M. Gallea, William Patalon III | | Blue Chip Books/Contrarian Investing | - |
| 9 History | "History doesn't repeat itself, but it rhymes." | Mark Twain | | | |
| 10 Risk Capacity™ | "He that is overcautious will accomplish little." | Friedrich von Schiller | | Money Magazine | 2007 Sept. |
| 10 Risk Capacity™ | "Design a portfolio you are not likely to trade... akin to premarital counseling advice; try to build a portfolio that you can live with for a long, long time." | Robert D. Arnott, President, First Quadrant Corp. | | Is Your Beta Big Enough to Cover Your Taxes? [answer is NO] | 1999 |
| 10 Risk Capacity™ | "Investment Policy [asset allocation] is the foundation upon which portfolios should be constructed and managed." | Charles D. Ellis | | Investment Policy | 1985 |
| 11 Risk Exposure | "Investment planning is about structuring exposure to risk factors." | Gene Fama, Jr. | | The Error Term | 2001, Dec |
| 11 Risk Exposure | "'Tis the part of a wise man to keep himself today for tomorrow, and not venture all his eggs in one basket." | Miguel de Cervantes | | - | - |
| 11 Risk Exposure | "Risk is good. Not properly managing your risk is a dangerous leap" | Evel Knievel, Motorcyclist | | - | - |
| 11 Risk Exposure | "History shows that in the long run a thoughtfully designed, diversified strategy of "passive" funds typically beats all but a few active managers. It's not easy to structure and maintain such a strategy. It requires some initial research and discipline to stay the course. But it’s much easier than predicting which active managers will randomly beat this approach." - | Eugene Fama, Jr., DFA | | - | 2001 |
| 11 Risk Exposure | "The $4.8 billion Orange County Employees' Retirement System, Santa Ana, Calif., more than doubled its total indexed assets to $1.2 billion during the 12 months ended Sept. 30, 2001, from $593 million the year before." "We think that (indexed) exposure was a reasonable portfolio for the return characteristics and compared favorably with active (management)," he said. | Farouki Majeed, chief investment officer | | ASSETS UP 30%: Where the action is: funds embrace enhanced indexing, by Fred Williams, www.pionline.com | 2002, Jan |
| 11 Risk Exposure | "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 Ibbotson, Ibbotson Associates | | The True Impact of Asset Allocation on Returns | 2001 |
| 11 Risk Exposure | "Ninety-seven percent of performance variation is due to asset class structure -- Study by of 31 institutional pension funds during a range of six- to 12-year periods." | Eugene F. Fama Jr. | | Dimensional Fund Advisors' Conference, University of Chicago Graduate School of Business | 1997 |
| 11 Risk Exposure | Don't invest all your money in just one or two stocks. That's the danger. I know a man who put all his money in just two stocks --a paper towel company and a revolving door company. He was wiped out before he could turn around. | Dave Astor | | - | 2001 |
| 11 Risk Exposure | "The essence of effective portfolio construction is the use of a large number of poorly correlated assets" | William Bernstein | | The
Intelligent Asset Allocator | 2001 |
| 11 Risk Exposure | "Approximately 94 percent of variability of a fund's investment return is due to asset allocation -- Study of 91 large pension funds over a 10-year period." | Gary P. Brinson, L. Randolph Hood and Gilbert L. Beebower | | Determinants of Portfolio Performance," Financial Analysts Journal, July-August 1986, Follow-up study, "Revisiting Determinants of Portfolio Performance: An Update," 1990 Working Paper | 1986, 1990 |
| 11 Risk Exposure | "It is a truth very certain that when it is not in our power to determine what is true we ought to follow what is most probable." | Rene Descartes, Discourse on Method | | Lady Luck, the theory of probability by Warren Weaver | |
| 11 Risk Exposure | "There is safety in numbers." | Euripides | | Lady Luck, the theory of probability by Warren Weaver | |
| 11 Risk Exposure | "What if your advisor talks only about returns, not risk? ...It's his job to take risk into account by telling you the range of possible outcomes you face. If he won't, go to a new planner, someone who will get real." | William F. Sharpe | | Money Magazine | 2007, June |
| 12 Invest & Relax | "Many receive advice, few profit by it." | Publilius Syrus | | quoted in Money Magazine, 2007 Sept. | 42 B.C. |
| 12 Invest & Relax | What is the best investment for the average investor? Thorley agreed with Odean: index funds. [Thorley and Odean are professors who study the market) | Mark Dempsey | | Robbing You Blind | 2000 |
| 12 Invest & Relax | "If we could choose only one family of funds for the ideal 401(k) plan, it would be Dimensional Fund Advisors. We believe DFA's institutional index funds are the best, and employees whose plans include them are fortunate...In 2001, a portfolio of DFA funds weighted equally among the asset classes we listed above would have appreciated by 1 percent. Doesn't seem like much but it's much better than the 12 percent loss in the Standard & Poor's 500 Index and the 23 percent decline by the average large-company growth fund." | Paul Merriman | | A world-class menu of 401(k) choices,CBS Marketwatch.com | 2002, Jan 16 |
