Benoit Mandelbrot Quotes

When the weather changes, nobody believes the laws of physics have changed. Similarly, I don't believe that when the stock market goes into terrible gyrations its rules have changed.

You can't change the market; the market just is.

Nothing ever surprises me about the market.

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

Bull markets and Bear markets can obscure mathematical laws, they cannot repeal them.

You can't buck the market.

The stock market is like a small row boat on a rough sea, bouncing around as it drifts, whereas the macro economy is like a large ocean liner, very ponderous and difficult to maneuver but without such a rough journey.

Prices don't merely reflect what people think things ought to cost today; they also reflect what people expect items to cost tomorrow.

As financial markets continue to broaden and deepen, the behavior of asset prices will play an important role in the formulation of monetary policy going forward, perhaps a more important role than in the past.

The delicate and intricate pattern of competition and cooperation in the economic behavior of the hundreds of thousands of citizens of Stockholm offers a challenge to the economist that is perhaps as complex as the challenges of the physicist and the chemist.

When volume drops off, prices settle down. Volume is the force that turns stocks higher.

Sector-specific price declines, uncomfortable as they may be for producers in that sector, are generally not a problem for the economy as a whole and do not constitute deflation.

I put forward a pretty general theory that financial markets are intrinsically unstable. That we really have a false picture when we think about markets tending towards equilibrium.

The techniques I developed for studying turbulence, like weather, also apply to the stock market.

… there is little rhyme or reason to the going up or coming down of the [Stock] Market

I don’t know why the Stock Market does what it does.

I can never predict what the markets will do. Sometimes it does the exact opposite of what I would have expected.

Markets shouldn't be moving in a straight line.

When I first began studying prices, it wasn't a topic that mathematicians were working on. Purely by accident, I saw a set of data on price changes presented in a lecture and realized they behaved similarly to the geometric models I was already studying.

I want the market to work if it can, and most of the time it will, but not without some pain.

Markets have built in inefficiencies, serious inefficiencies which are well known.

As I have said before, the daily machinations of the stock market are like a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

I like the PC market. It's a big market, but it's a very volatile market as well.

The value of Bitcoin is astronomical, but the price goes all over the place as a million buyers and sellers try to figure out what that value is and how likely it is to manifest.

You cannot have an asset that goes up in price 1% every month or 1% every six months or every day without people starting to start thinking it'll do the same tomorrow, so that's why these bubbles form.