Barry Ritholtz Quotes

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

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

Cause and effect, the riddle of all history, is a particular devil in financial history; and never more so than today, where entire classes of security are collapsing not on public exchanges and stock-tickers but because there are no markets to establish prices this side of nothing.

The substantial uncertainty about the path of asset price movements going forward necessarily reduces the case for altering policy in advance of the move.

Wall Street, in the main, hates uncertainty, which manifests itself in depressed share prices of companies whose prospects lack 'visibility.' But where the market can err is in confusing uncertainty with risk.

I'm not sure that the current value of the NASDAQ is justified, but I'm not sure that it isn't.

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.

I don't pretend that I can predict the future value of the growth rate or rate of return.

There are domains in which expertise is not possible. Stock picking is a good example. And in long-term political strategic forecasting, it's been shown that experts are just not better than a dice-throwing monkey.

Predicting the market is always tough.

Hundreds of investors ask me questions each year about the dilemmas they confront. Their worst problem? Uncertainty. They are traumatized and become emotional or confused to the state of inaction. Even worse, they try to solve a short-term problem in a way that hurts them financially in the long run.

Uncertainty about sales impedes business planning and could harm capital formation just as much as uncertainty about inflation can create uncertainty about relative prices and harm business planning.

I don't really like hedging. To me, if something needs to be hedged, you shouldn't have a position in it.

Markets shouldn't be moving in a straight line.

Anyone who says he is an expert in the market is lying to you. There is no such thing.

I think bubbles are things people see with 20/20 hindsight. If you look at any particular period where prices go up and then they go down, you will always find people who predicted that they would go down. Those are the people you pay attention to.

People always come up to me and ask what the next 'big short' will be. The truth is I simply do not have an answer, and do not want to have an answer, to this question.

There is almost no limit to the ability of investors to ignore the lessons of the past.

Predicting oil prices is anyone's guess.

The future is never clear; you pay a very high price in the stock market for a cheery consensus. Uncertainty actually is the friend of the buyer of long-term values.

I put heavy weight on certainty. It's not risky to buy securities at a fraction of what they're worth.

If you roll dice, you know that the odds are one in six that the dice will come up on a particular side. So you can calculate the risk. But, in the stock market, such computations are bull - you don't even know how many sides the dice have!

In every mutual fund prospectus, in every sales promotional folder, and in every mutual fund advertisement (albeit in print almost too small to read), the following warning appears: "Past performance is no guarantee of future results."

We do not have, nor have had, and never will have an opinion about where the stock market, interest rates, or business activity will be a year from now.

If I have noticed anything over these 60 years on Wall Street, it is that people do not succeed in forecasting what's going to happen to the stock market.