Whitney Tilson Quotes

It's difficult to make your clients understand that there are certain days that the market will go up or down 2%, and it's basically driven by algorithms talking to algorithms. There's no real rhyme or reason for that. So it's difficult. We just try to preach long-term investing and staying the course.

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

I think the value of venues like CNBC is that they give investors an opportunity to reevaluate the situation minute by minute, but maybe we don't need to follow the market so closely.

The most important thing is to stay the course - not to get shaken out of the market during a difficult time.

I think in terms of 20-year horizons.

The problem with most people who play the market is that they are not flexible.

The true investor welcomes volatility ... a wildly fluctuating market means that irrationally low prices will periodically be attached to solid businesses.

I think all presidents should take the long view of history.

To be an investor you must be a believer in a better tomorrow.

It's quite clear that stocks are cheaper than bonds. I can't imagine anybody having bonds in their portfolio when they can own equities, a diversified group of equities. But people do because they, the lack of confidence. But that's what makes for the attractive prices. If they had their confidence back, they wouldn't be selling at these prices. And believe me, it will come back over time.

There is something in people; you might even call it a little bit of a gambling instinct… I tell people investing should be dull. It shouldn't be exciting. Investing should be more like watching paint dry or watching grass grow. If you want excitement, take $800 and go to Las Vegas.

The only thing that looks good is the stock market, but if you raise interest rates even a little bit, that's going to come crashing down.

Nobody really knows what the market is going to do, but it sure looks like we are going to have a lot more volatility.

A good investor in this new world knows to always expect the unexpected.

A basic truth of management - if not of life - is that nearly everything looks like a failure in the middle.

As I look back on it now, it's obvious that studying history and philosophy was much better preparation for the stock market than, say, studying statistics.

In everything we ought to look at the end.

Great investing requires a lot of delayed gratification.

I do believe CDSs [credit default swaps] have been miscast, much as poor workmen tend to blame their tools.

On days like today you realize that you just can't keep these hypergrowth stocks down.

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.

You would expect to see that first in high-yield [debt], but it was in the most liquid thing in the world. So that, I think - it's a little bit of a warning that we've got to be prepared and just be careful.

Many times in my life I've been upset about something and said to myself, "Will this matter in two years?" Not even in two months.

Long ago, Sir Isaac Newton gave us three laws of motion, which were the work of genius. But Sir Isaac's talents didn't extend to investing: He lost a bundle in the South Sea Bubble, explaining later, 'I can calculate the movement of the stars, but not the madness of men.' If he had not been traumatized by this loss, Sir Isaac might well have gone on to discover the Fourth Law of Motion: For investors as a whole, returns decrease as motion increases.

The traditional thinking has been that the stock market likes certainty.