Robert J. Shiller Quotes

You do not have to be a rocket scientist to know that it is hard for a market to keep going up when more and more people are getting out.

We feel that fundamentally Wall Street is sound, and that for people who can afford to pay for them outright, good stocks are cheap at these prices

Markets that are overpriced will correct and fall of their own weight..

Like a bank run, a decline in stock prices creates its own momentum.

Markets tend to always overshoot when they get really ebullient.

Near the top of the market, investors are extraordinarily optimistic because they've seen mostly higher prices for a year or two. The sell-offs witnessed during that span were usually brief. Even when they were severe, the market bounced back quickly and always rose to loftier levels. At the top, optimism is king, speculation is running wild, stocks carry high price/earnings ratios, and liquidity has evaporated. A small rise in interest rates can easily be the catalyst for triggering a bear market at that point.

It's quite clear that stocks are cheaper than bonds. I can't imagine anybody having bonds in their portfolio when they can own equities, a diversified group of equities. But people do because they, the lack of confidence. But that's what makes for the attractive prices. If they had their confidence back, they wouldn't be selling at these prices. And believe me, it will come back over time.

Tech stocks are trading at a 30-year-low when compared to the multiples of industrials (companies). It's the weirdest bubble when everyone hates everything.

A crash really occurs when you suddenly have a violent downturn in the market that then heralds a long bull market.

When good news about the market hits the front page of the New York Times, sell.

Markets rebounded quickly from morning jitters after the London Thursday terrorist bombing.

If the markets had behaved badly, that would obviously add to people's sense of alarm... but there has been a lot of reassurance coming, particularly in the way the Brits handled all this. There seems to be no great fear that something like that is going to happen here.

When the market goes to hell, it's more of an opportunity than a problem.

The trend of the market is up, not down. Shorting stocks puts you against that trend and thus makes it more difficult to make money.

Fear tends to manifest itself much more quickly than greed, so volatile markets tend to be on the downside. In up markets, volatility tends to gradually decline.

You have a class of investors and you have a class of speculators. The speculators historically haven't been big enough to cause the investors to doubt the long-term vision of stock.

We say, 'The market plummets,' like it's some roaring creature.

I love the competitive part of stocks. A lot of fear and greed, that's all it is. All I see is green and red.

Generally, variations in earnings aren't nearly as impactful on glamour growth stocks as are changes in image and, well, sexiness. I often think of glamour stocks as though they are attractive women dressing to the nines.

When herding behaviour among investors ramps up, a stock's or index's growth rate can increase faster than exponentially, leading to more herding. This positive feedback brings the system to a tipping point. About two-thirds of the time, a crash results.

I think the tech stock, the public market is still completely traumatized by the dotcom crash. I think the investors and reporters and analysts and everybody is determined to not get taken advantage of again, and that is what everybody who lived through 2000, what they kind of remember.

Rising interest rates are considered bad for stocks because they raise the cost of doing business and depress corporate earnings and because higher yields make bonds relatively more attractive than stocks to investors.

The bubble, as investing phenomenon, has been well studied ever since the 17th-century tulip bulb frenzy. Its counterpart in bear markets is not well understood.

Once again, stock markets have been threatened with extinction for almost 75 years, and I have found that stock markets are harder to kill than roaches.

If we're in a bubble, it's the weirdest bubble I've ever seen, where everybody hates everything.