The miracle of compounding returns is overwhelmed by the tyranny of compounding costs.
The grim irony of investing, then, is that we investors as a group not only don’t get what we pay for, we get precisely what we don’t pay for. So if we pay for nothing, we get everything.
You know the rule of 72, divide the number into 72, any number you want, and that’s how long it will take your money to double.
I will create value for society, rather than extract it.
On balance, the financial system subracts value from society.
My biggest prediction for the future is that people are going to start looking after individual investors.
Fund investors are confident that they can easily select superior fund managers. They are wrong.
Successful investing is about owning businesses and reaping the huge rewards provided by the dividends and earnings growth of our nation’s – and, for that matter, the world’s – corporations.
If you have trouble imagining a 20% loss in the stock market, you shouldn’t be in stocks.
Hint: money flows into most funds after good performance, and goes out when bad performance follows.
Reversion to the mean is the iron rule of the financial markets.
If the data do not prove that indexing wins, well, the data are wrong.
The principal role of the mutual fund is to serve its investors.
The courage to press on regardless – regardless of whether we face calm seas or rough seas, and especially when the market storms howl around us – is the quintessential attribute of the successful investor.
Managed funds are astonishingly tax-inefficient.
It’s 1450 out of 1500 ETF funds that I just wouldn’t touch because they’re not diversified enough. Or they have some huge speculative twist to them that if you can guess the markets right you will do very well for a day or two but who can do that? Nobody.
I think it’s gone much too far. Most of them are not worth the powder to blow them to hell.
The multiple failings of our flawed financial sector are jeopardizing, not only the retirement security of our nation’s savers but the economy in which our entire society participates.
Income earned by the sweat of your brow should be taxed at the lowest rates, not the highest. Capital gains should be taxed at a higher rate.
In Las Vegas we all know that it’s the croupiers who win. At the race track, it’s those who control the handle who win. State lotteries, does anybody think the participants in the lottery win? No. The state wins.