Paul Samuelson Quotes

A decade ago, I really did believe that the average investor could do it himself. I was wrong. I've come to the sad conclusion that only a tiny minority, at most one percent, are capable of pulling it off. Heck, if Helen Young Hayes, Robert Sanborn, Julian Robertson, and the nation's largest pension funds can't get it right, what chance does John Q. Investor have?

Ex-Fidelity mutual fund manager Peter Lynch was certainly brilliant in one respect: he knew to get out when the gettin' was good.

I've been investing in the stock market for 27 years and, within that time, have helped investors beat the market nearly four to one.

The number of managers with great track records in a given market depends far more on the number of people who started in the investment business (in place of going to dental school), rather than on their ability to produce profits.

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.

The debate can be put in the form of the question: Resolved, that the best of money managers cannot be demonstrated to be able to deliver the goods of superior portfolio-selection performance. Any jury that reviews the evidence, and there is a great deal of relevant evidence, must at least come out with the Scottish verdict: Superior investment performance is unproved.

You don't need to be a rocket scientist. Investing is not a game where the guy with the 160 IQ beats the guy with 130 IQ.

Twenty years in this business convinces me that any normal person using the customary three percent of the brain can pick stocks just as well, if not better, than the average Wall Street expert.

Bankers are likeable rascals. Now that we are all wise to 'em, it's been shown that they don't know any more about finances than the rest of us know about our businesses... which has proved to be nothing.

Everybody has a different strategy, but everybody agrees that active management does not beat the market.

Science when well-digested is nothing but good sense and reason.

I talk to hundreds of companies a year and spend hour after hour in heady pow-wows with CEOs, financial analysts and my colleagues in the mutual-fund business, but I stumble onto the big winners in extracurricular situations, the same way you do.

The good news is, the stock market is closed and it can't hurt us again until tomorrow.

I really took the lead on putting together the real estate fund-to-funds. Real estate was always interesting to me.

We have to restore confidence that the marketplace can deliver services as well as it can goods.

I don't know if for sure in absolute terms if Jim Flaherty is the best Finance Minster in the world, but I am sure that he is the best Finance Minster per inch in the world.

Those with the enterprise lack the money and those with the money lack the enterprise to buy stocks when they are cheap.

There are few people with such talent, so there are few able to judge what I am doing.

She [Carolyn Maloney] knows the financial issues, that's why we thought she was perfect because we're in a - we're in, as you know, a financial crisis, an economic crisis, and I know that she'll see the whole picture.

Most investors would be better off in an index fund.

Logic is the subject that has helped me most in picking stocks, if only because it taught me to identify the peculiar illogic of Wall Street. Actually Wall Street thinks just as the Greeks did. The early Greeks used to sit around for days and debate how many teeth a horse has. They thought they could figure it out just by sitting there, instead of checking the horse. A lot of investors sit around and debate whether a stock is going up, as if the financial muse will give them the answer, instead of checking the company.

It must be so, Plato, thou reason'st well!

Investments - particularly those that involve the change of control of a company - only work when they work well for all parties involved.

But whatever the consensus on the EMH, I know of no serious academic, professional money manager, trained security analyst, or intelligent individual investor who would disagree with the thrust of EMH: The stock market itself is a demanding taskmaster. It sets a high hurdle that few investors can leap.

I can be a new Di Stefano, but I can't be a new Pelé. He is the one that goes beyond the limits of logic.