Richard Thaler Quotes

The world of derivatives is full of holes that very few people are really aware of. It's like hydrogen and oxygen sitting on the corner waiting for a little flame.

Hedge funds try to produce above-average investment returns using tactics ranging from traditional stock-picking to complex derivative and arbitrage plays. High minimum investments, redemption restrictions and aggressive strategies make them suitable mainly for more sophisticated and well-heeled investors.

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

If you think Wall Street has a short memory, you're dead wrong. No, the folks who work on Wall Street, regulate Wall Street - and, above all, invest in its wares, notably its hedge funds - don't have a bad memory. They don't have any memory at all.

Low-volatility funds, which tend to smooth out performance, have been especially popular since the financial crisis. The PowerShares S&P 500 Low Volatility Fund is the oldest, begun in 2011.

In our view, derivatives are financial weapons of mass destruction carrying dangers that, while latent, are potentially lethal.

I don't think that hedge funds are bad per se. I think they're just one more financial tool. And in that sense, they're useful.

The starting point of my career in money management in 1973-74 was the time of the only true bear market any living non-Japanese investor has seen in major markets. Equities, real estate, you name it, everyone got run over.

The financial markets generally are unpredictable. So that one has to have different scenarios... The idea that you can actually predict what's going to happen contradicts my way of looking at the market.

The trouble is that the average trader on Wall Street, he or she is so young, he doesn't even remember the recession of 2001, let alone the previous one.

I could never gamble on stocks and shares because I saw my father get hurt that way - he lost quite a lot of money when the stock market collapsed in 2001.

You have a class of investors and you have a class of speculators. The speculators historically haven't been big enough to cause the investors to doubt the long-term vision of stock.

You know what term you don't hear anymore? Arbitrage. The markets have gotten too efficient.

There can be few fields of human endeavor in which history counts for so little as in the world of finance.

The actions of hedge fund managers in exercising their fiduciary responsibilities to their investors is not the reason why Chrysler is in jeopardy.

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.

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

Bulls don't read. Bears read financial history. As markets fall to bits, the bears dust off the Dutch tulip mania of 1637, the Banque Royale of 1719-20, the railway speculation of the 1840s, the great crash of 1929.

Markets are constantly in a state of uncertainty and flux and money is made by discounting the obvious and betting on the unexpected.

Investors have to ask themselves two questions. How much can we grow our investments? And, can we afford our mistakes?

Mutual funds give people the sense that they're investing with the big boys and that they're really not at a disadvantage entering the stock market.

More and more investors may be coming into markets everywhere but that doesn't mean that the markets are really getting more and more efficient, even in the United States. It does mean that there is more access for savvy investors who watch the money flows.

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.

Main Street investors, who cannot trade credit default swaps, should not be tempted to trade an instrument with the same risk profile simply because it has been given a different name.

A second reason why science cannot replace judgement is the behavior of financial markets.