Tony Hsieh Quotes

Investment must be rational; if you can't understand it, don't do it.

It's better to do nothing with your money than something you don't understand.

Many businesses fail because the owner wasn't willing to invest and wasn't educated on the difference between spending money frivolously and investing money into the business for growth, and the risks and rewards of that cash infusion.

The things that I've learned is, try to make all the mistakes with your own money and on a small level so that when you are responsible for a partner's money or assets, you've learned, and you don't make bigger mistakes.

Never invest in a business you don't understand.

Don't invest in what you don't know. Learn first then invest.

I am very conservative. I don't invest in anything that is risky. If someone comes to me with a project idea, I let them risk their money, not mine.

Investors should invest on what they know. The biggest mistake is to invest on what they don't know.

The last thing you want to do, unless it's a very unusual situation, is to invest money.

I'm not sure at all that I'm any good at this mentoring/investing business - that's why I'm using my own money, and that's why it's not a career.

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 knew a guy who had $5 million and owned his house free and clear. But he wanted to make a bit more money to support his spending, so at the peak of the internet bubble he was selling puts on internet stocks. He lost all of his money and his house and now works in a restaurant. It's not a smart thing for the country to legalize gambling [in the stock market] and make it very accessible.

By refusing to pay too much for an investment, you minimize the chances that your wealth will ever disappear or suddenly be destroyed.

You could lose hundreds or thousands one day on paper and gain it all back the next, and it has literally no effect on your immediate future, provided the money you have in the market is money you're investing for the long haul (meaning at least three to five years).

I'm smart with my money, I invest conservatively. I don't mind paying top-dollar, but I don't want to get ripped off.

Investors should start with a view of skepticism. They should become intellectual investors rather than emotional investors. They should be careful, and they should be skeptical.

Too many people say to their brokers, I can't deal with this. Take my money. Do what you want. That's the worst attitude you can have.

If your investing approach requires that you become Nostradamus to succeed, then you are destined to fail.

Wide diversification is only required when investors do not understand what they are doing.

I have plenty of investments that I wish I'd never made. But the model is to lose money on a lot of investments and then make 1,000X or 10,000X on an investment.

I'm not a money manager, but I can tell you what the conventional wisdom is. The younger you are, the more risk you can take on.

Don't gamble; take all your savings and buy some good stock and hold it till it goes up, then sell it. If it don't go up, don't buy it.

Maybe we should teach schoolchildren probability theory and investment risk management.

I could never gamble on stocks and shares because I saw my father get hurt that way - he lost quite a lot of money when the stock market collapsed in 2001.

You can't have bank holding companies acting as hedge funds. You can't have them taking a million-dollar pension plan for Joe Schmo the bus driver and treat it with the same risk appetite that you treat George Soros' pocket money. It's fundamentally ridiculous.