Thomas Piketty Quotes

Investing is a business where you can look very silly for a long period of time before you are proven right.

It is important for investors to understand what they do and don't know. Learn to recognize that you cannot possibly know what is going to happen in the future, and any investment plan that is dependent on accurately forecasting where markets will be next year is doomed to failure.

What I'm trying to say is that for the average investor, what I would encourage them to do is to understand that there's inflation and growth. It can go higher and lower and to have four different portfolios essentially that make up your entire portfolio that gets you balanced.

It all comes down to interest rates. As an investor, all you're doing is putting up a lump-sump payment for a future cash flow.

Investing is about making probabilistic decisions with limited information about an unknowable future. The variables are well known, as are the possible outcomes.

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

All equity categories, correctly calculated, create near-identical lifelong returns. They just get there via wildly differing paths.

I'm not someone who puts their money in a fund that earns 2 to 5 percent a year. I'm a man who tries to change things, move something with my money, to create jobs and, of course, at the same time earn more money with it.

Stock prices relative to company assets are no better at signaling the likelihood of future earnings growth than they were the day the Titanic sank, and risk management is a good deal worse.

In the investment business, you must expect to be wrong.

The government can’t guarantee that you should earn profit from your investments.

Well, there's always risk in long-term investment.

There are a lot of parallels between being a mutual fund manager and being a general manager. Both in the financial markets and in baseball, we're dealing with a world where uncertainty reigns. We're trying to predict the future performance of human beings. It's a fundamental difficulty for which we both have to account.

Always keep your portfolio and your risk at your own individual comfortable sleeping point.

The ability to select stocks, manage them over time and know when to sell them is incredibly difficult, even for professional fund managers.

The financial markets generally are unpredictable. So that one has to have different scenarios... The idea that you can actually predict what's going to happen contradicts my way of looking at the market.

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.

Investors have to ask themselves two questions. How much can we grow our investments? And, can we afford our mistakes?

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 investor of today does not profit from yesterday's growth.

I have no complaints about losing money I put in high-risk investments. I did some of that when I had real money; my informed choice, my measured gamble.

Why not invest your assets in the companies you really like? As Mae West said, 'Too much of a good thing can be wonderful'.

I really did believe that the most successful investments were the ones that you could own for the long run.

All I'm trying to do is manage money and take care of my shareholders.

My philosophy is that if I have any money I invest it in new ventures and not have it sitting around.