James O'Shaughnessy Quotes

I've lived through periods of illiquidity before. Asset prices come down. The economy slows or even goes into recession. Then the cycle re-starts. We buy at lower prices with less leverage.

We've always been modestly leveraged, and we've never believed in a great deal of leverage on either our private equity business or on our investment banking business. And I think it really goes back to my uncle and dad growing up in the Depression and just seeing what happened to people who were overly levered.

Usually, you measure appetite of investors by their ability or willingness to take a bit of leverage on their positions.

Buy when there's blood in the streets, even if the blood is your own.

Risk managers and investment bankers and actually, all kinds of investors took on more risk than they expected. So there was a failure of risk management. There was a failure to recognize how much risk there was in some of these securities that people bought.

Many of us like to think of financial economics as a science, but complex events like the financial crisis suggest that this conceit may be more wishful thinking than reality.

When you have risk aversion in Japan, the normal day-to-day outflows that happen in a normal market environment slow down.

There's a tendency to look at investments in isolation. Investors focus on the risk of individual securities.

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.

The real key to making money in stocks is not to get scared out of them.

I have a million dollars in the stock market, because if I lose a million dollars, I don't personally care.

If you were approaching the TARP investments from a pure investment standpoint, then there's no doubt in my mind the taxpayer lost, and probably lost big.

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

Today, even small entities that trade complex instruments or are granted sufficient leverage can threaten the global financial system.

In an extreme credit crunch, leveraged purchases of gold cause forced sales, because any price correction triggers margin calls. As a result, gold can be very volatile - upward and downward - at the peak of a crisis.

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

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.

Investors don't like uncertainty.

The global financial crisis - missed by most analysts - shows that most forecasters are poor at pricing in economic/financial risks, let alone geopolitical ones.

What's so seductive about the efficient markets hypothesis is that it applies nine years out of ten. A lot of the time it works. But when it stops working, you blow up.

If you are not making any mistakes, you are being excessively risk-averse. Investing involves risk, and that means you will occasionally be wrong. And although it is okay to be wrong, it is not okay to stay wrong.

What I invest in, while not risky for me, may be too risky for most people.

There is always risk involved. You can't be a capitalist only when there are investment profits but then a socialist when you experience losses.

The way to make money is to buy when blood is running in the streets.

I've got a huge, huge position in mortgage-backed securities. I started accumulating them in 2009, when the market was really down and things were really scary.