John C. Bogle Quotes

I don't entirely reject the idea of efficient markets. It needs updating.

Markets are self-regulating only because some brave investors are prepared to bet against the market trend.

I believe, in the stock market - that's one of my fields - that most people are irrational. And to be irrational, you can be irrational in so many different ways that, practically, the result is indeterminate.

In the short run, the market is a voting machine, but in the long run it is a weighing machine.

I take the market-efficiency hypothesis to be the simple statement that security prices fully reflect all available information.

One of the funny things about the stock market is that every time one person buys, another sells, and both think they are astute.

The adaptive markets hypothesis says that all economic institutions, like our own species, develop and change over time, depending on the population of investors that are engaged with them.

Of course. I favor passive investing for most investors, because markets are amazingly successful devices for incorporating information into stock prices.

In college, I was told the market can't be beat.

In the world I've known most of my life, old stories quickly lose their power over capital markets and get replaced by new surprises. That which everyone fixates on gets priced into the stock market quickly and can't drag on.

Gentlemen. There is no man nor group of men who can buy all the stocks that the American public can sell.

The proposition is that prices reflect all available information, which in simple terms means since prices reflect all available information, there's no way to beat the market.

One of the reasons why we can make a lot of money in equity markets is because they're auction-driven, and auction-driven markets are very different from almost any other kind of market.

The problem with most people who play the market is that they are not flexible.

The Stock Market is designed to transfer money from the Active to the Patient.

To establish the right price for a stock, the market must have adequate information, but it by no means follows that is the market has this information it will thereupon establish the right price.

The stock market is a wonderfully efficient mechanism for transferring wealth from the impatient to the patient.

The generally accepted view is that markets are always right -- that is, market prices tend to discount future developments accurately even when it is unclear what those developments are. I start with the opposite view. I believe the market prices are always wrong in the sense that they present a biased view of the future.

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

The sad truth is that it is precisely those who disagree most with the hypothesis of efficient market pricing of stocks, those who pooh-pooh beta analysis and all that, who are least able to understand the analysis needed to test that hypothesis.

So smile when you read a headline that says "Investors lose as market falls." Edit it in your mind to "Disinvestors lose as market falls-but investors gain." Though writers often forget this truism, there is a buyer for every seller and what hurts one necessarily helps the other. (As they say in golf matches: "Every putt makes someone happy.")

The basic story remains simple and never-ending. Stocks aren't lottery tickets. There's a company attached to every share.

He really meant to tell them that the big money was not in the individual fluctuations but in the main movements that is, not in reading the tape but in sizing up the entire market and its trend.

We are convinced that the intelligent investor can derive satisfactory results from pricing of either type (market timing or fundamental analysis via price). We are equally sure that if he places his emphasis on timing, in the sense of forecasting, he will end up as a speculator and with a speculator's financial results." And "The speculator's primary interest lies in anticipating and profiting from market fluctuations. The investor's primary interest lies in acquiring and holding suitable securities at suitable prices.

The reader can test his own psychology by asking himself whether he would consider, in retrospect, the selling at 156 in 1925 and buying back at 109 in 1931 was a satisfactory operation. Some may think that an intelligent investor should have been able to sell out much closer to the high of 381 and to buy back nearer the low of 41. If that is your own view you are probably a speculator at heart and will have trouble keeping to true investment precepts while the market rushes up and down.