Stanley Druckenmiller Quotes

Don't bottom fish.

Short sellers sell stock they have borrowed, hoping to buy it back later when its price has fallen.

Usually, you measure appetite of investors by their ability or willingness to take a bit of leverage on their positions.

The way to build superior long-term returns is through preservation of capital and home runs...When you have tremendous conviction on a trade, you have to go for the jugular. It takes courage to be a pig.

Once I'm committed, I'm unafraid of the outcome.

In politics, guts is all.

My biggest strength is I'm courageous, or if I am afraid of something, I do it anyway. I do what I feel. It's nothing personal against anyone, so that courageousness has been very good to me.

I'd rather be strongly wrong than weakly right.

Presidents with strong nerves are decisive. They don't balk at unpopular decisions. They are willing to make people angry. Bush had strong nerves. Clinton, who passed up a chance to eliminate Osama bin Laden, did not. Obama is a people pleaser, a trait not normally associated with nerves of steel.

In the 1920s you could buy stocks on margin. You could put 10 percent down and borrow the rest against your stocks.

I do not use short selling. The fund has not shorted a stock since the 2002 to 2003 time frame. At that time I did short three stocks, on which I broke even on two and made money on one of them. The experience taught me that I was not going to be using short selling going forward for a slew of reasons.

When you trade sometimes you lose.

Buy cheap and sell dear.

I am ... one of a different sort: one of those who risks his skin to prove his platitudes.

We should willingly take risks in supporting new projects. The tendency is to play it safe when funding is low, but we need to remember that the greatest risks have the greatest payoffs.

He that trades with Money he hath borrowed at 8 or 10 per Cent cannot hold Market with him that borrows his Money at 6 or 4.

There’s nothing like doing things with OPM—Other People’s Money. It takes the risk out of it.

Well private money can take risks in a way that government money often isn't willing to.

You can be far more aggressive when you're making good profits.

The few times that Soros has ever criticized me was when I was really right on a market and didn't maximize the opportunity.

I like things with upside. That's how you make money.

People come in. They are too gung ho. They invest too much money in things they don't know. They lose it and then they clam up and stop investing. Then they miss the actual boom. That's the nature of the market.

It has to be understood, it has to be measured, and the investment needs to make sense, but debt on its face is not a bad thing.

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.

I play with leverage.