Colin Camerer Quotes

While neurological studies have tried to identify components responsible for fear and greed, the impact on finance is less clear.

As long as you have markets, you'll have excesses. People went crazy with tulip bulbs. They went crazy with the South Sea Bubble, they went crazy internet stocks, they went crazy with the uranium stocks back when I was first getting started. I mean, you know, you're not going to change the human animal. And the human animal really doesn't get a lot smarter.

Most of the time common stocks are subject to irrational and excessive price fluctuations in both directions as the consequence of the ingrained tendency of most people to speculate or gamble... to give way to hope, fear and greed.

Investors are impatient and they are also desperate for the 'next big thing,' and they are not paying attention to the fact that the 'next big thing' can be an economic crisis that they have created by being very irresponsible with their power.

The main purpose of the stock market is to make fools of as many men as possible.

In every stockjobbing swindle every one knows that some time or other the crash must come, but every one hopes that it may fall on the head of his neighbor, after he himself has caught the shower of gold and placed it in safety.

No one's fearful, everyone's greedy, and it will eventually end.

Education is a bubble in a classic sense. To call something a bubble, it must be overpriced, and there must be an intense belief in it.

Fear and euphoria are dominant forces, and fear is many multiples the size of euphoria. Bubbles go up very slowly as euphoria builds. Then fear hits, and it comes down very sharply. When I started to look at that, I was sort of intellectually shocked. Contagion is the critical phenomenon which causes the thing to fall apart.

Fear, greed and hope have destroyed more portfolio value than any recession or depression we have ever been through.

Wall Street people learn nothing and forget everything.

Financial markets have a tendency to go to excess.

When the man who ought to want a stock doesn't want it, why should I want it?

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.

We are in a big, fat, ugly bubble. And we better be awfully careful.

A pin lies in wait for every bubble. And when the two eventually meet, a new wave of investors learns some very old lessons: First, many in Wall Street (a community in which quality control is not prized) will sell investors anything they will buy. Second, speculation is most dangerous when it looks easiest.

Volatility is a symptom that people have no idea of the underlying value-that they have stopped playing the asset game. They're not buying because it's a company with certain attributes. They're buying because the price is rising. People are playing games not related to any concept at all of what the long-term value of the enterprise is. And they know it.

While enthusiasm may be necessary for great accomplishments elsewhere, on Wall Street it almost invariably leads to disaster

Successful investing is anticipating the anticipations of others.

You have to be okay with wins and losses. You can't just be looking for the wins and, when the losses happen, you can't buy more and more because you're sure it's going to bounce. We call that revenge trading.

Markets do very weird things because it reacts to how people behave, and sometimes people are a little screwy.

The stock market is overpriced. Everything is overpriced. Junk is king.

Markets as well as mobs respond to human emotions; markets as well as mobs can be inflamed to their own destruction.

Banks may be considered as the primary source of "paper speculation," and only the foster the spirit of gambling in paper, in lands, in canal schemes, town lot schemes, manufacturing schemes and whatever could hit the madness of the day.