Greg Smith Quotes

People who invest make money for themselves; people who speculate make money for their brokers. And that, in turn, is why Wall Street perennially downplays the durable virtues of investing and hypes the gaudy appeal of speculation.

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

It's no secret that big institutional investors have a lot of advantages on Wall Street. They get the first chance to buy hot initial public offerings. They get to meet in person with companies' managements.

Wall Street is littered with the bones of those who knew just what to do, but could not bring themselves to do it.

No statement is more true and better applicable to Wall Street than the famous warning of Santayana: "Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it".

There seems to be an unwritten rule on Wall Street: If you don't understand it, then put your life savings into it. Shun the enterprise around the corner, which can at least be observed, and seek out the one that manufactures an incomprehensible product.

If (investing) weren't a little difficult, everybody would be rich.

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

Once the brokerage house, rather than the bank, became the locus for American savings, that money would find its way into the stock market, because the broker was someone with a much higher tolerance for risk than the banker.

Investors tend to discover 'hot' mutual fund managers just after a successful run and just before the inescapable force of mean reversion is about to kick in.

Any Wall Street advertising that does not go into the boring details of methodology is most likely to be pushing past performance.

Normally I would not recommend a book that tells you how to make money in the stock market. Most of these books are aimed at gullible folk, and they usually make much more money for their authors than they do for the investing public.

Individual investors have become far more powerful than anyone gives them credit for. Today, 85 million Americans invest in stocks. Collectively, that kind of buying and selling power can move markets.

Let's take a timeout. Let's allow investors the opportunity in a period of market calm to re-examine what's happened and to deploy new strategies into the marketplace.

Guys like me on the investor side are a dime a dozen.

Mutual funds were created to make investing easy, so consumers wouldn't have to be burdened with picking individual stocks.

I've always wanted to invest. That's why I started working on Wall Street in the first place, back in 1986 when I went through the Salomon Brothers training program.

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.

The best way to make money on Wall Street is to sell the most sophisticated [and complex] products to the most unsophisticated clients.

If the country is to flourish, capital must be invested in enterprise. But those who seek to draw upon other people's money must be wholly candid regarding the facts on which the investor's judgment is asked.

We feel that fundamentally Wall Street is sound, and that for people who can afford to pay for them outright, good stocks are cheap at these prices

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

Hedge funds are other hedge funds' toughest competition. And there are just more of them, and it's tougher and tougher all along.

It's important that we educate Americans about how hedge funds and private equity play completely different roles.