James Buchan Quotes

Money is a hazard.

I have met so many people who had their life savings wiped out, who lost their homes, who are barely back with their heads above water.This was a disaster for our country, and we can never let that happen again.

I knew a guy who had $5 million and owned his house free and clear. But he wanted to make a bit more money to support his spending, so at the peak of the internet bubble he was selling puts on internet stocks. He lost all of his money and his house and now works in a restaurant. It's not a smart thing for the country to legalize gambling [in the stock market] and make it very accessible.

If your investing approach requires that you become Nostradamus to succeed, then you are destined to fail.

The definition of winning has become distorted. If winning the rights to a property brings with it hundreds of millions of dollars in losses, what have you won? When faced with the prospect of heavy financial losses, we have consistently walked away and have done so again.

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.

Finance, like time, devours its own children.

If I finance a bank and I know if the bank will get in trouble, I will be hit and I will lose money, I will put a price on that.

If we don't change, millions of American families are just one medical emergency, or one layoff, away from financial disaster and bankruptcy.

One thing about the business and investing world that I connect to very intimately is that there is little room to deny the harsh realities of your mistakes. A bad call can lose you many millions.

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.

I can't afford to die; I'd lose too much money.

I have been rich, and I have been broke. Some of it is my fault for choosing bad management and making bad investments. But that is life - we all take risks.

Whoever gambles with the dollar, loses

Hideous bankruptcy is here ... yet you deliberate .... Is it so magnanimous ... to give a portion of one's revenue to save all of one's possessions?

I've learned that all investments have risk.

There's no enjoyment to losing money.

There is no sure-fire way to get rich quickly. In fact, the pursuit of that usually leads to ruin.

A broker is a man who runs your fortune into a shoestring.

It would be one of the most irritating experiences in the world to do a lot of work to uncover a fraud and then at have it go from X to 3X and at h the crooks happily partying with your money while you're meeting margin calls. Why would you want to go within hailing distance of that?

Only put money in the banking system that you can afford to lose!

I have no interest in bailing out anybody, quite frankly, and I think banks have to suffer every dollar of loss if they make a bad loan.

There is scarcely an instance of a man who has made a fortune by speculation and kept it

Who would you trust right now? Which bank would you trust? Which investment would you trust? Do you really want to put your money; do you want to suffer more of these losses that we just had? You know, these volatility that we see is just unexplainable by any rational standards. Nobody has any clue about how to explain this, and nobody wants to experience that. So, we hold more money back, we don't necessarily want to invest in the market and by default, people are saving more.

Stock market risk is ok, but not for Social Security.