Arthur Levitt Quotes

Mutual funds give people the sense that they're investing with the big boys and that they're really not at a disadvantage entering the stock market.

The amount of data and analysis available for free is a true example of information explosion has leveled the playing field for individual investors.

Buying securities is usually easier than selling securities.

My advice to most people is don't short stocks. It's a very, very difficult business. And you can really get clobbered.

Very few of the heroes of the Golden Age of American finance had much interest in the solid realities of what underlay their structure of stocks and bonds and credits .

Speculator: One who bought stocks that went down.

As you know President Bush has been traveling around the country trying to sell his new Social Security plan. He wants to take our retirement money and invest it in the stock market. He says nothing can go wrong. I'll mention that to Martha Stewart the next time I see her.

Absent a lot of surprises, stocks are relatively predictable over twenty years. As to whether they're going to be higher or lower in two to three years, you might as well flip a coin to decide.

There is the fact that - people have had a lot of confidence that the Chinese leadership could fix what is wrong with their economy so it wouldn't have ripple effects around the world. I think that confidence is being shaken by how difficult it is for them to manage their stock market and their currency.

Gambling in the mark has been the great indoor sport of the capitalists for months, and consequently food has increased by 25 to 100 per cent.

The recent market run-up that appreciated run-of-the- mill shares also chanced to send up those token gold holdings. Pure luck, undeserved and unlikely to reoccur. Good questions outrank easy answers.

The stock market resembles a huge laundry in which institutions take in large blocks of each others washing ... without rhyme or reason.

Price fluctuations have only one significant meaning for the true investor. They provide him with an opportunity to buy wisely when prices fall sharply and to sell wisely when they advance a great deal.

I told you, computers are like women. If you shout at them or ask them to do too many things at once, they shut down and you won't even get a sniff" pg. 4

If you have trouble imagining a 20% loss in the stock market, you shouldn't be in stocks.

It's dangerous to short stocks.

When the weather changes and hurricanes hit, nobody believes that the laws of physics have changed. Similarly, I don't believe that when the stock market goes into terrible gyrations its rules have changed. It's the same stock market with the same mechanisms and the same people.

Nothing important on Wall Street can be counted on to occur exactly in the same way as it happened before.

While enthusiasm may be necessary for great accomplishments elsewhere, on Wall Street it almost invariably leads to disaster

The stockmarket is a semi-psychotic creature given to extremes of elation and despair.

There will always be bull markets followed by bear markets followed by bull markets

Your adrenaline starts to go when the market opens in the morning. It's like sports programming.

Idiots emit bogons, causing machinery to malfunction in their presence. System administrators absorb bogons, letting machinery work again.

The stock market has always had its own meter. Sometimes it's ahead of itself, sometimes it's behind itself. A broken watch is right twice a day.

I just the other day got, an internet was sent by my staff at 10 o'clock in the morning on Friday and I just got it yesterday. Why? Because it got tangled up with all these things going on the internet commercially... They want to deliver vast amounts of information over the internet. And again, the internet is not something you just dump something on. It's not a truck. It's a series of tubes.