Douglass North Quotes

I hated being a junior investment banker. I loved the research business, the wealth management business.

I had done some work on index funds in my senior thesis at Princeton in 1951.

I have nothing against investment banking, but it's like massaging money rather than creating money.

My most difficult class at Harvard Business School would have to be finance.

My career in academic research has not been involved with active management of securities. I've tried to understand risk-and-return relationships; also the pricing of derivative securities.

If my strength is technology, financial structuring is my son's skill.

We know what we are. Our business is originating, distributing, and managing capital for individuals and institutions.

If I've learned anything as an economic analyst, it is that the stock market and economic winds can shift by the hour.

I've been studying mutual funds since 1949, when I began researching my senior thesis at Princeton University.

There are a lot of jobs in the financial industry that do need a math major.

I have a long history of looking at things from an investor's perspective by training and background.

Finance is wholly different from the rest the economy.

There's 4,000-plus stocks out there, and sometimes it gets a little confusing. And we like them to start with the portfolio grader, but if they'd like to see how I use the system and pick stocks - we offer that as well.

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.

I think one of the key differentiators I bring to the table as a venture capitalist is a solid understanding of the public markets and how they operate.

And at a relatively early age, ten or so, I invested my first share of stock. And I used to follow, look at companies and so forth. But throughout the whole period, and indeed right through my college years, while I was involved in the stock market, always interested in finance, I never thought of it as a full-time job.

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

As an economics undergraduate, I also worked on a part-time basis in Cambridge, Massachusetts, for a company that was advising customers about portfolio decisions, writing reports.

Once your kids are grown and you know that you're completely healthy, consider canceling your life insurance policy.

Stock prices relative to company assets are no better at signaling the likelihood of future earnings growth than they were the day the Titanic sank, and risk management is a good deal worse.

The special sphere of finance within economics is the study of allocation and deployment of economic resources, both spatially and across time, in an uncertain environment. To capture the influence and interaction of time and uncertainty effectively requires sophisticated mathematical and computational tools.

My dad was in the life insurance business, so I learned about selling when I was about 14 because I started working as a secretary.

The markets were run by mathematicians and their models but they had no business sense.

There are two times in a man's life when he should not speculate [on the Stock Market]: when he can't afford it, and when he can.

When you hear of somebody named Goldberg, you think of a guy sitting behind a desk investing your money.