David Wessel Quotes

The Stock Exchange is something very different. There is no economy and no production of goods and services. There are only fantasies in which people from one hour to the next decide that this or that company is worth so many billions, more or less. It doesn't have a thing to do with reality or with the Swedish economy.

In fact, of all hoodoos in Wall Street I think the resolve to induce the stock market to act as a fairy godmother is the busiest and most persistent.

I rarely think the market is right. I believe non dividend stocks aren't much more than baseball cards. They are worth what you can convince someone to pay for it.

There is a substantial correlation between an election year and how the market finishes.

The data strongly suggest that very good years in the U.S. stock market are followed by more good years.

On a given day, you can have market fluctuations where prices fluctuate far more than the underlying economic value of the unit.

The end of the decline of the Stock Market will probably not be long, only a few more days at most.

Wild swings in share prices have more to do with the "lemming- like" behaviour of institutional investors than with the aggregate returns of the company they own.

Facebook stock continues to plummet. People started selling once they found out their mom bought it too.

Perhaps never before or since have so many people taken the measure of economic prospects and found them so favorable as in the two days following the Thursday [24th October 1929] disaster.

We believe the super stock option will become a reality before the end of 2000, ... It's a good idea whose time has come.

Nearly everyone interested in common stocks wants to be told by someone else what he thinks the market is going to do. The demand being there, it must be supplied.

We have a swarm of people in the stock market - not out of knowledge, not out of expectation, but out of basically a gambling instinct, the hope that prices will go up.

I mean, you can explain the fact that these are depressed prices, you know. We think these assets are going to be worth a lot more. And I think that case can be made in certain situations. But I think to just say, you know, we're going to say a dollar of cash is worth $2 all of a sudden, it isn't worth $2. It's worth a dollar today.

If a lot of people feel like this company is undervalued and go out and buy the stock, the stock price will go up reflecting the higher value of this company. You might have information because you trade with them or because you've done some research on them.

The way I see it, gold is headed over $1000 an ounce, probably much higher. At anywhere near current prices, it's the lowest risk, highest potential investment I can think of.

Time and again, in every market cycle I have witnessed, the extremes of emotion always appear, even among experienced investors. When the world wants to buy only [bonds], you can almost close your eyes and [buy] stocks.

Stock prices aren't real things. They're just froth on a wave. The wave is the only real thing, which investors forget when they're watching the ticket slither by.

I'm not sure most of the people that get caught up in the middle of a bubble can be described as irrational. It seems pretty rational to buy a house and flip it in the next few weeks at a profit when that's been happening for along time.

To some extent, stocks are like Rembrandts. They sell based on what they've sold in the past. Bonds are much more rational. No-one thinks a bond's value will soar to the moon.

Yellen’s comments suggest, and I agree, that we are in an asset bubble.

Buy when most people, including experts, are pessimistic, and sell when they are actively optimistic.

He really meant to tell them that the big money was not in the individual fluctuations but in the main movements that is, not in reading the tape but in sizing up the entire market and its trend.

The dumbest reason in the world to buy a stock is because it's going up.