Carol Loomis Quotes

A financial crisis is a great time for professional investors and a horrible time for average ones.

Investors have few spare tires left. Think of the image of a car on a bumpy road to an uncertain destination that has already used up its spare tire. The cash reserves of people have been eaten up by the recent market volatility.

The starting point of my career in money management in 1973-74 was the time of the only true bear market any living non-Japanese investor has seen in major markets. Equities, real estate, you name it, everyone got run over.

I'm sometimes accused of being hostile to mutual funds. That's not fair, really. There is a place for them. Still, I am hostile to one thing, which is trying to use funds to time your way in and out of the market. That's a recipe for very bad results.

Any bull market covers a multitude of sins, so there may be all sorts of problems with the current system that we won't see until the bear market comes.

One of the problems with hedge funds is that they are changing so rapidly. If you have the balance sheet that closed business last night, by 11 A.M. this morning, that won't tell you very much about what they're doing.

The government can’t guarantee that you should earn profit from your investments.

The markets were run by mathematicians and their models but they had no business sense.

In 2008, people who invested in hedge funds needed capital badly, but many of the funds would not return their money. However, I gave money back to any investor who requested it. It was the bottom of the market and a pretty tough time.

All equity categories, correctly calculated, create near-identical lifelong returns. They just get there via wildly differing paths.

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.

Like everybody, I have invested in things that have gone bad, because there's never any guarantee of success or profit when it comes to money.

Given the typical fee structures of hedge funds, they need to do something different to make money in a consistent way.

Because of my own experience with market fluctuation, I recognize the great risks one takes on investments. This converts the Social Security safety net into a risky proposition many cannot afford to take.

It doesn't help to follow every rise and fall of your portfolio. It's better to tune out the day-to-day shifts, in fact. But getting a handle on the larger picture will make you feel more secure, and that goes a long way in calming your fear.

Mutual funds have historically offered safety and diversification. And they spare you the responsibility of picking individual stocks.

The down market favours the small two-, three-, four-person company, not the huge company with 100 people losing half a million dollars a month.

Stock prices relative to company assets are no better at signaling the likelihood of future earnings growth than they were the day the Titanic sank, and risk management is a good deal worse.

I've found that when the market's going down and you buy funds wisely, at some point in the future you will be happy.

Stocks change. Industries change. But the underlying reasons certain stocks are good investments remain the same. Only the fullness of time reveals which are the most sound.

When it comes to investing, you are your own worst enemy.

What I find very interesting about the mutual funds managers is that here are people who are the new masters of the universe. They're managing billions, yet they're subject to this quiet daily tyranny of numbers.

I've got a huge, huge position in mortgage-backed securities. I started accumulating them in 2009, when the market was really down and things were really scary.

If the bottom dropped out of the market and the artist was not going to sell anything, he or she will keep working, and the dealer will keep trying to find some way to convince somebody to buy this stuff.

If you think Wall Street has a short memory, you're dead wrong. No, the folks who work on Wall Street, regulate Wall Street - and, above all, invest in its wares, notably its hedge funds - don't have a bad memory. They don't have any memory at all.