Long or Short Capital

Skepticism is the chastity of the intellect, and it is shameful to surrender it too soon or to the first comer.
George Santayana

Past Quotes Entirely Relevant to Investing

Why would the majority favor policies that hurt the majority? … The majority favors these policies because the average person underestimates the social benefits of the free market, especially for international and labor markets. In a phrase, the public suffers from anti-market bias.
Bryan Caplan GMU Economics Professor

Past Quotes Entirely Relevant to Investing

I cannot give you a sure-fire formula for success, but I can give you the formula for failure, which is: Try to please everybody.
Herbert B. Swope

Past Quotes Entirely Relevant to Investing

We Spaniards know a sickness of the heart that only gold can cure.
Hernándo Cortés

Past Quotes Entirely Relevant to Investing

Norville: What do you do if the envelope is too big for the slot?
Ancient Mail Sorter: Well, if you fold ’em, they fire you. I usually throw ’em out.
-An exchange from The Hudsucker Proxy

Past Quotes Entirely Relevant to Investing

The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.
William Butler Yeats

Past Quotes Entirely Relevant to Investing

Beware of the man who works hard to learn something, learns it, and finds himself no wiser than before. He is full of murderous resentment of people who are ignorant without having come by their ignorance the hard way.

-Kurt Vonnegut

Past Quotes Entirely Relevant to Investing

HT to PairofSox.

You may not be interested in strategy, but strategy is interested in you.
Leon Trotsky

Past Quotes Entirely Relevant to Investing

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.
William Bernstein

[hat tip: Infectious Greed]

Past Quotes Entirely Relevant to Investing

The world is full of smart-alecs who don’t understand anything.

-Richard Feynman, Nobel Prize winner in theoretical physics

Past Quotes Entirely Relevant to Investing

You must have long range goals to keep you from being frustrated by short range failures

-Charles C. Noble

Past Quotes Entirely Relevant to Investing

Widsom comes from suffering and error and when the passions die down and the observations begin.

-David Brooks in a March 8th, 2007 Op-Ed

Past Quotes Entirely Relevant to Investing

“Casual commitments invite casual reversal, exposing portfolio managers to the damaging whipsaw of buying high and selling low. Only with the confidence created by a strong decision-making process can investors sell speculative excess and buy despair-driven value.” [Ed: our emphasis]
-David Swensen, Pioneering Portfolio Management

Past Quotes Entirely Relevant to Investing

Many traders aim to get out of harm’s way by avoiding exposure to rare events – a mostly defensive approach.

I am far more aggressive than those traders and go one step further; I have organized my career and business in such a way as to be able to benefit from them.

-Nassim Taleb whose new book Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable comes out April 17th, 2007.

Past Quotes Entirely Relevant to Investing