John Paulson Quotes

Well, I think the secret is if you have a lot of stocks, some will do mediocre, some will do okay, and if one of two of 'em go up big time, you produce a fabulous result. And I think that's the promise to some people.

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.

In real estate, you make 10% of your money because you're a genius and 90% because you catch a great wave.

Capital is that part of wealth which is devoted to obtaining further wealth.

Sometimes it takes longer to create value, but if the companies generate more earnings, the stocks will ultimately reflect that.

You don't get rewarded for taking risk; you get rewarded for buying cheap assets. And if the assets you bought got pushed up in price simply because they were risky, then you are not going to be rewarded for taking a risk; you are going to be punished for it.

Since we try and take a fairly buy-and-hold approach to our newsletter portfolios and don't sell at every whipsaw, we want to have a mix of stocks that will perform at both ends of the oscillation.

I made my money by selling too soon.

If the goal is to build companies that maximize long-term equity value, then optimizing corporate performance in a way that Wall Street appreciates is obviously critical to that goal.

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

I don't think anybody ever makes any money buying and selling stock. They have to make money by keeping the stock.

It's nice to do an IPO where your investors get value straightaway and the share price pops up; it proves you left something on the table for them.

We're very much focused on full shareholder-value return. We have to get our stock moving. But I won't do something in the short run that I don't feel is right for the long run. That, I've watched many CEOs do.

We don't really look at the stock, you know? Because for us, it's about the long term. And so we're very much focused on long-term shareholder value but not the short-term kind of stuff.

Many significant stock-price inefficiencies can occur when a company is spun off.

Our responsibility is to maximise shareholder value, and if that means we can make short-term investment where we can maximise short-term value, we can do that.

I love the Knicks and Rangers, right, but you still have a responsibility to your shareholders. They're not there because they're fans. You don't invest hundreds of millions of dollars in a stock because you're a fan. You do it because you think that the business is going to increase in value, that the stock price is going to go up.

Of course if you happen to time the market really well, you can make more money with some of these smaller companies, but for someone with no exposure I wouldn't want to take the risk that they timed it wrong.

If you want me to do things only for ROI reasons, you should get out of this stock.

Most people get interested in stocks when everyone else is. The time to get interested is when no one else is. You can't buy what is popular and do well.

Many people will admit that they made a mistake [putting money in dot-coms or telecoms at their peak] But that doesn’t mean that they’ve changed their mind about anything in particular. It doesn’t mean that they are now able to avoid that mistake.

It never was my thinking that made the big money for me. It always was my sitting. Got that? My sitting tight! It is no trick at all to be right on the market. You always find lots of early bulls in bull markets and early bears in bear markets. I've known many men who were right at exactly the right time, and began buying or selling stocks when prices were at the very level which should show the greatest profit. And their experience invariably matched mine--that is, they made no real money out of it. Men who can both be right and sit tight are uncommon.

Many an optimist has become rich simply by buying out a pessimist.

Experience teaches that the time to buy stocks is when their price is unduly depressed by temporary adversity. In other words, they should be bought on a bargain basis or not at all.

It is far more difficult... to know when to sell a stock than when to buy.