John C. Bogle Quotes

Markets shouldn't be moving in a straight line.

It's very difficult for any particular segment of the stock market to sustain superior performance. The watch word for our financial markets is, "reversion to the mean" i.e. what goes up must come down, and it's true more often than you can imagine.

The upward move at the beginning of a bull market is almost always huge compared with the vacillations late in the bear market. If you try to pick a bottom, you will miss a good part of the action.

I don’t know why the Stock Market does what it does.

Commodities tend to zig when the equity markets zag.

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.

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

If you can predict where the market's going, just do what you can predict. If you can't, which is the presumption of dollar cost averaging or time cost averaging, either one, then you're trying to ease in. But if the market rises more than it falls most of the time, easing in is, by definition, a loser's game.

Volatility may be rising simply because investors must digest more information every day.

Investors tend to discover 'hot' mutual fund managers just after a successful run and just before the inescapable force of mean reversion is about to kick in.

When the weather changes, nobody believes the laws of physics have changed. Similarly, I don't believe that when the stock market goes into terrible gyrations its rules have changed.

On a given day, you can have market fluctuations where prices fluctuate far more than the underlying economic value of the unit.

… a pin lies in wait for every bubble. And when the two eventually meet, a new wave of investors learns some very old lessons..

I can never predict what the markets will do. Sometimes it does the exact opposite of what I would have expected.

Nothing ever surprises me about the market.

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

The market is in the process of correcting itself.

Long-term investing has gotten so popular, it's easier to admit you're a crack addict than to admit you're a short-term investor.

The biggest mistake investors make is to believe that what happened in the recent past is likely to persist. They assume that something that was a good investment in the recent past is still a good investment. Typically, high past returns simply imply that an asset has become more expensive and is a poorer, not better, investment.

Nothing important on Wall Street can be counted on to occur exactly in the same way as it happened before.

You can't buck the market.

Cheer the bull, or cheer the bear; cheer both, and you will be trampled and eaten.

If it is hard to imagine that 20% of losses on the stock market, you should never participate

There is such an overvaluation of technology stocks that it is absurd. I would include our stock in that category. It is bad for the long-term worth of the economy.

What we have found over the years in the marketplace is that derivatives have been an extraordinarily useful vehicle to transfer risk from those who shouldn't be taking it to those who are willing to and are capable of doing so.