Martin Feldstein Quotes

I don’t know why the Stock Market does what it does.

All market response results from a reduction of uncertainty.

Markets are unforgiving, and sometimes they move for reasons we can't possibly foresee.

Remember that banks aren't markets. The market is amoral. The market doesn't care who you are. You're a trade to the market. The market will sell you if they think you're riskier.

I do believe women have different ways of taking risks, of ruminating a bit more before they jump to conclusions. And I think that as a result, particularly on the, on, you know, on the trading floor, in the financial markets in general, the approach would be different.

Predicting the market is always tough.

If all you needed to do is to figure out what company is better than others, everyone would make a lot of money. But that is not the case. They keep raising the prices to the point when the odds change.

I always found the appeal to the market gods a bit odd. Why would the market fix mistakes instead of aggravating them?

There's no statistical evidence that human beings have an ability to move in and out of the markets effectively. It's next to impossible.

What turned me on then, and turns me on even today - and when the time comes from me to retire from management I think I'd still be interested in it - is that everything that happens in the world affects the price of securities.

The markets do numbers, not nuance.

Markets shouldn't be moving in a straight line.

Nothing ever surprises me about the market.

Bulls don't read. Bears read financial history. As markets fall to bits, the bears dust off the Dutch tulip mania of 1637, the Banque Royale of 1719-20, the railway speculation of the 1840s, the great crash of 1929.

The financial markets generally are unpredictable. So that one has to have different scenarios... The idea that you can actually predict what's going to happen contradicts my way of looking at the market.

Markets are constantly in a state of uncertainty and flux and money is made by discounting the obvious and betting on the unexpected.

One thing on psychology, which we've always known, is that every investor says they're long-term - and they are until the market takes a hit.

A financial crisis is a great time for professional investors and a horrible time for average ones.

I think the value of venues like CNBC is that they give investors an opportunity to reevaluate the situation minute by minute, but maybe we don't need to follow the market so closely.

Investing is about making probabilistic decisions with limited information about an unknowable future. The variables are well known, as are the possible outcomes.

When the weather changes, nobody believes the laws of physics have changed. Similarly, I don't believe that when the stock market goes into terrible gyrations its rules have changed.

And finally, no matter how good the science gets, there are problems that inevitably depend on judgement, on art, on a feel for financial markets.

Markets love volatility.

If you think Wall Street has a short memory, you're dead wrong. No, the folks who work on Wall Street, regulate Wall Street - and, above all, invest in its wares, notably its hedge funds - don't have a bad memory. They don't have any memory at all.

Nowhere does history indulge in repetitions so often or so uniformly as in Wall Street.