Bill Maris Quotes

There was a time when a company could not sell its shares to the public unless its revenues were growing and it was turning a profit. Companies that lost money were deemed too risky for public investors.

The Mexican debt crisis, Latin American debt crisis, the crises of the 1990s, the Wall Street stock market crash, and other events should have reminded us, and did remind us, that financial instability remains a concern, remains a problem.

Remember, 2000 was the year of the dot-com bust. The telecom industry lost about $2 trillion in market capital at that time.

I don't care if Facebook's valuation goes to one gillion. It can go so high we have to make up numbers. It is still not a bubble because there is still not another Facebook in the pipeline.

I want to go public because I have the right reason to go public - because the benefits outweigh the costs.

The stock market is overpriced. Everything is overpriced. Junk is king.

When I started in the business in 1999 and 2000, we had companies that were going public in two, three or four years.

Normally, the market peaks before bad news emerges. That's what happened in 1929, and that's what happened in 2000.

In a bubble, eventually people start saying, 'Wait a minute... these prices are way too high! What is anyone buying anymore? What could they possibly be thinking?' And then there's a correction and a bursting.

The end of the 'tech bubble' in the year 2000 is, of course, widely recognized, as the NASDAQ stock index erased three-quarters of its value between 2000 and 2003.

The worst excesses of the dot-com era are gone.

We are in a big, fat, ugly bubble. And we better be awfully careful.

In every stockjobbing swindle every one knows that some time or other the crash must come, but every one hopes that it may fall on the head of his neighbor, after he himself has caught the shower of gold and placed it in safety.

One of the first big bubbles, of course, was the huge and horrible South Sea Bubble in England. And the aftermath was interesting. Many of you probably don't remember what happened after the South Sea Bubble, which caused an enormous financial contraction, and a lot of pain. They banned publicly traded stock in England for decades.

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

My take on the whole dot-com bubble was that a lot of people who wanted to make a lot of money got too excited and hyped up the commercial aspects of the Internet prematurely. I think the vision of the Internet as a democratizing medium - as everyone's printing press - is real. We got distracted from that by the mass hallucinations of the bubble.

I think the stock market is a very dangerous place to be at the present time. In fact, the stock market today is almost identical to where it was in October 2007 and then there was a $7 trillion crash and before that in March 2000.

There is general agreement among researchers that nearly all stock pickers, whether they know it or not-and few of them do-are playing a game of chance.

More money is lost anticipating the changes in the overall stock market than any other way of investing.

There is no moral difference between gambling at cards or in lotteries or on the race track and gambling in the stock market. One method is just pernicious to the body politic as the other kind.

An irresistable footnote: in 1971, pension fund managers invested a record 122% of net funds available in equities - at full prices they couldn't buy enough of them. In 1974, after the bottom had fallen out, they committed a then record low of 21% to stocks.

September and October of 2008 was the worst financial crisis in global history, including the Great Depression.

Wild swings in share prices have more to do with the "lemming- like" behaviour of institutional investors than with the aggregate returns of the company they own.

Facebook stock continues to plummet. People started selling once they found out their mom bought it too.