Jim Cramer Quotes

Trading demands total concentration and the ability to do several things at once while instantly recalling trading prices from the day, or week, before.

Market timing, by the way, is a tag some buy-and-hold investors use to put down anything that involves using your brain. These are the same people who like to watch the locomotive coming and get run down in the name of discipline.

In my business investing, you are buying a stock, and someone else is selling the stock. Right there, that's like a debate. Is the stock going up, or is it going to go down?

Just because a stock is down doesn't mean it's a great buy.

Macro-trading requires a high degree of skill, focus and repetition. Life events, such as birth, divorce, death of a loved one and other emotional highs and lows are obstacles to success in this specific field of finance.

There is no training, classroom or otherwise, that can prepare for trading the last third of a move, whether it's the end of a bull market or the end of a bear market.

I've learned there's a big difference between a long-focused value investor and a good short-seller. That difference is psychological and I think it falls into the realm of behavioral finance.

The secret to being successful from a trading perspective is to have an indefatigable and an undying and unquenchable thirst for information and knowledge.

Part of my advantage is that my strength is economic forecasting, but that only works in free markets, when markets are smarter than people. That's how I started. I watched the stock market, how equities reacted to change in levels of economic activity, and I could understand how price signals worked and how to forecast them.

Successful investing is anticipating the anticipations of others.

To beat the market you'll have to invest serious bucks to dig up information no one else has yet.

Whenever you try to pick market tops and bottoms, you are making a prediction. Guessing what stock is going to outperform the market is forecasting, as is selling a stock for no apparent reason. Indeed, nearly all capital decisions made by most people are unconscious predictions.

I have never for a minute felt in was my stock picking abilities. I feel that my stock picking abilities aided- I was able to pick out which are the good stocks in the good market, but I have been blessed with a great market.

Good analysis is very useful when you want to convert a political decision into an investment. It can also go the other way and drive policy.

I grade my stocks. I'm what they call a quant, one of the geeks of the stock market.

And finally, no matter how good the science gets, there are problems that inevitably depend on judgement, on art, on a feel for financial markets.

Numerous academic studies have shown that amateur investors make poor traders - buying stocks for the wrong reasons, holding losers for too long, and acting on whims and emotions.

I did get introduced to the financial markets while I was in college. And I think I learned also how to sort of filter out all of the nonrational, or nonsensible, noise and sort of concentrate on what matters, and that's really what markets are about.

Investing is about intellectual honesty. You want to know what you know. You want to know, mostly, what you don't know.

There are two ways to approach the market. You can guess which direction prices will go in next, or you can figure out what businesses and their securities are really worth.

Fundamentalists who say they are not going to pay any attention to the charts are like a doctor who says he's not going to take a patient's temperature.

Making an investment decision is like formulating a scientific hypothesis and submitting it to a practical test.

Whenever I enter a position, I have a predetermined stop. That is the only way I can sleep. I know where I'm getting out before I get in. The position size on a trade is determined by the stop, and the stop is determined on a technical basis... I never think about [stop vulnerability], because the point about a technical barrier - and I've studied the technical aspects of the market for a long time - is that the market shouldn't go there if you are right.

My experience is that very few people have what it takes to be a successful investor, as I discussed in The Arrogance of Stock Picking.

Your job as a smart investor is to separate the facts and the news from the fiction and the noise.