John Gutfreund Quotes

You know what term you don't hear anymore? Arbitrage. The markets have gotten too efficient.

The institutional investor remains the bigger influence on individual trades simply because the institutional investor has more money to support the order and that will have more of an impact on the stock.

The United States has the most sophisticated financial markets in the world, which does not leave much room to maneuver. But it also offers investors the greatest access to information and the ability to execute trades quickly and efficiently. So it is a mixed bag of opportunity.

One of the funny things about the stock market is that every time one person buys, another sells, and both think they are astute.

We live in an age of great jitteriness in the financial markets. And there's no doubt at all, I think, that the volume of computer-traded stocks has helped contribute to that.

In college I started studying the stock market. I went down to the stock exchange, watched all the activity from the visitors' gallery, people running around, calling numbers, shouting, and all the paper flying and the bells ringing, and of course that was exciting, and it seemed to lend itself to my analytical skills.

It seemed glamorous when I used to go into work and get to be on a trading floor or see how the business worked a little bit before I ever understood what it was.

Financial institutions like to call what they do trading. Let's be honest. It's not trading; it's betting.

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

The stock market is a discounter of all known information.

One way for investors to protect themselves from a rapid change in the price of a stock is to use a limit order rather than a market order.

What Wall Street is, they're market makers. Wall Street's business model is making money on velocity of money. They're a click industry. That's what Wall Street is. They make a lot of money when there's a lot of turnover. And they make a lot of money when that velocity is fast.

I got into online trading. It was alarmingly easy to do. I went through the whole cycle of emotions, from supreme self-confidence to total impotence. I broke even in the end.

I loved working on Wall Street. I loved the meritocracy of it and the camaraderie of the trading floor.

The one thing about markets is that they do not give any advance notice. If they did, they would be arbitraged away.

If you must invest in paper, learn to be an options trader. Then you will know how to make money whether the markets are going up or down.

I believe, in the stock market - that's one of my fields - that most people are irrational. And to be irrational, you can be irrational in so many different ways that, practically, the result is indeterminate.

The problem with most people who play the market is that they are not flexible.

On Wall Street, every story becomes known so quickly. They are all so connected that everything disseminates there faster than anywhere.

Allowing short selling is allowing people to sell - instead of having to buy the stock and then sell it, which doesn't do much; allow them to sell it, and then buy it. In which case they can express that information and the idea is that you would get more accurate valuation of companies by letting people express both their positive information and their negative information through either long or short selling.

Television series are like the stock market. There's room for bears and bulls but no room for pigs.

Listen to market strategists, and a word that comes up a lot these days is 'volatility.'

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

I went into investments out of interest and thought I knew a little. The longer I've been involved, the less I realise I'd known.

I started trading stocks, options and futures while I was at UCLA, using my earnings from working summers at the old IBM plant on Cottle Road. I never lost interest in how companies work. It's fundamental to who I am.