Jeremy Grantham Quotes

If you are not making any mistakes, you are being excessively risk-averse. Investing involves risk, and that means you will occasionally be wrong. And although it is okay to be wrong, it is not okay to stay wrong.

I never attempt to make money on the stock market. I buy on the assumption that they could close the market the next day and not reopen it for five years.

In my view, the biggest investment risk is not the volatility of prices, but whether you will suffer a permanent loss of capital. Not only is the mere drop in stock prices not risk, but it is an opportunity. Where else do you look for cheap stocks?

The greater the potential for reward in the value portfolio, the less risk there is.

Most people might just as well buy a share of the whole market, which pools all the information, than delude themselves into thinking they know something the market doesn't.

Always keep your portfolio and your risk at your own individual comfortable sleeping point.

If your investing approach requires that you become Nostradamus to succeed, then you are destined to fail.

I have plenty of investments that I wish I'd never made. But the model is to lose money on a lot of investments and then make 1,000X or 10,000X on an investment.

Both cheap value stocks and more glamorous growth stocks can work well in a portfolio - if done right.

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.

My advice to the average investor in 1988 is to be patient and think long-term. It will take 18 months for confidence to get better and, in the meantime, this is absolutely no place for short-term money.

No one knows what the top-performing asset class will be next year. Lacking this prescience, your next-best solution is to own all of the classes and rebalance regularly.

The last thing you want to do, unless it's a very unusual situation, is to invest money.

It's easy to buy. Prove that you bought at the right time and the right price.

Investing is a business where you can look very silly for a long period of time before you are proven right.

The fundamental work of investment management is filtering. The question is what do you filter.

The bottom line is this: Cash, in modest increments, has a role in any portfolio. But unless you are Warren Buffett, you should limit it to 2 or 3 percent.

I don't really like hedging. To me, if something needs to be hedged, you shouldn't have a position in it.

I'm going to reveal the grand secret to getting rich by investing. It's a simple formula that has worked for Warren Buffett, Carl Icahn and all the greatest investment gurus over the years. Ready? Buy low, sell high.

We believe in constructing the portfolio so that we put our biggest amount of money in our highest-conviction idea, and then we view the other ideas relative to that.

In some industries, we refer to risk taking as 'research and development.' At financial institutions, we often take risk by investing in securities.

People with 401(k)s need to be very conservative. Picking bottoms should be for insiders and traders.

Well, there's always risk in long-term investment.

It is a tenet of my investment style that, on the subject of common stock investment, maximizing the upside means first and foremost minimizing the downside. The deleterious effect of permanent capital loss on portfolio returns cannot be overstated.

Too many investors overvalue companies in the near term while undervaluing them in the long term.