Charlie Munger Quotes

The general systems of money management today require people to pretend to do something they can't do and like something they don't. It's a funny business because on a net basis, the whole investment management business together gives no value added to all buyers combined. That's the way it has to work. Mutual funds charge two percent per year and then brokers switch people between funds, costing another three to four percentage points. The poor guy in the general public is getting a terrible product from the professionals.

Mutual fund managers want your money in their funds. They get paid based on assets under management.

In 2014, Blackstone was the most profitable money manager in the world. I did not anticipate that.

I was involved with Wells Fargo Bank as a consultant in the late 1960s and early 1970s, when I suggested to them that they develop a product that has become known as index funds.

It's the company itself, but most of these mutual fund companies, the guy who runs the company is just a fact totem and the guy who runs the money is the power. But we really don't know who they are.

I'm delighted to be joining INVESCO, an organization that has been growing both in terms of assets under management and the breadth of investment capabilities offered. I see great potential in working with the accomplished investment centers within INVESCO and providing expertise to help develop strategic solutions for our clients.

If you don't like the idea that most of the money spent on lottery tickets supports government programs, you should know that most of the earnings from mutual funds support investment advisors' and mutual fund managers' retirement.

Legg Mason's structure is misunderstood by the market. Legg Mason has an affiliate model. They own 100% of their affiliates, which are investment managers such as Permal, Western Asset Management, and Royce.

Plenty of funds have fine long-term returns despite being tax-inefficient and generally costly. But a dirty secret is this: Average, no-load fund investors do much worse than the funds - or the market.

There's more honor in investment management than in investment banking.

Pension funds, endowments, and private investors trust Mitt Romney's former company Bain Capital enough to hand it billions of dollars in assets.

The Vanguard Experiment was designed to prove that mutual funds could operate independently, and do so in a manner that would directly benefit their shareholders.

The grim irony of investing is that we investors as a group not only don't get what we pay for, we get precisely what we don't pay for.

Brokerage firms don't sell customers stock so much as they sell those horrible mutual funds

It is interesting that the investment industry has invented new ways to lose money when the old ways seemed to work just fine.

I was a trader for a company. That's different from the brokers who we sort of disdain as sort of just errand boys.

I think this country would be much better off if we did not have capital punishment.... We cannot ignore the fact that in recent years a disturbing number of inmates on death row have been exonerated.

Getting an unsophisticated client was the golden prize. The quickest way to make money on Wall Street is to take the most sophisticated product and try to sell it to the least sophisticated client.

We've used derivatives for many, many years. I don't think derivatives are evil, per se, I think they are dangerous.

A vast industry of stockbrokers, financial planners, and investment advisers skims a fortune for themselves off the top in exchange for passing their clients' money on to people who, as a whole, cannot possibly outperform the market.

I do not sell life insurance. I sell money. I sell dollars for pennies apiece. My dollars cost 3 cents per dollar per year.

The idea of a company that's earning money, not losing money, that's not, let's say 'industrially endangered,' to have just cutbacks so they can earn another $12 million or $20 million or $40 million in a year where no one's counting is really a horrible act when you think about it on every level. First of all, it's certainly not necessary. It's doing it at the worst time. It's throwing people out to a larger, what is inevitably a larger unemployment heap for frankly no good reason.

It's quite astonishing how much money people make in the hedge fund business and in the private equity field, and how well-off affluent families really are.

The biggest gains, in terms of decreasing the country's energy bill, the amount of carbon dioxide we put into the atmosphere, and our dependency on foreign oil, will come from energy efficiency and conservation in the next 20 years. Make no doubt about it. That's where everybody who has really thought about the problem thinks the biggest gains can be and should be.

Our investment bank looks like it does because its customers like our expansive network and want to do equity, debt, M&A, custody, move money, deposit money, et cetera.