Fund Management Quotes

Fund consultants like to require style boxes such as "long-short," "macro," "international equities." At Berkshire our only style box is "smart."

Well, actually, I manage a couple of stock portfolios or funds or whatever you want to call 'em, and I think I've done relatively well with them.

Often, investors will discover a manager after he's had a terrific run, usually when he lands on a magazine cover somewhere. Invariably, funds swell up with new investor money just before they revert to their long-term averages.

Institutions like mutual funds often worry that if they disclose their plans to buy a stock, copycats will move quickly and drive up the stock before the purchase is completed.

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.

99% of fund managers demonstrate no evidence of skill whatsoever.

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.

I believe that the behavior of too many of our corporations investment bankers and fund managers has jeopardized some of the trust that investors have had. It's not the economic engine that we need to focus on, but the need to make sure that our investors receive their fair share of the returns that that great economic system produces.

The corporate killer downsizing is directly responsive to what the mutual funds have wanted.

Most investors would be better off in an index fund.

We need, in effect, to make the phantom 'lock-boxes' around the trust fund real.

I'm getting rid of the carried interest provision.

Requiring fund managers to disclose how they vote would increase accountability and mean that pensioners and ordinary investors would more easily be able to see how those acting on their behalf vote on all issues, including remuneration.

If I were to leave and raise a venture fund, I would have to find 10 or 100 LPs. They would all give me a bunch of money, and I would take a percentage of that to pay myself. They would expect me to invest that over the next three years, and they want that money back in seven or eight years.

Despite all the media coverage, glitz and glam of hedge funds, they have not done well for their investors. They have high - some say excessively high - fees; their short- and long-term performance has been poor.

The mutual fund industry has been built, in a sense, on witchcraft.

Successful hedge funds will be entrepreneurial; it is the essence of the craft.

The U.N. must be a good steward of the funds entrusted to it. Abuse and waste are therefore not a mere public relations problem. Institutional reform is not a one-off event, like applying a fresh coat of paint.

The Vanguard Experiment was designed to prove that mutual funds could operate independently, and do so in a manner that would directly benefit their shareholders.

My day job, running a fund management company, means I know that I and my team can't afford not to read every word of every document about assets or markets we propose to invest in, and to be absolutely clear we are complying with all the legal and regulatory requirements involved.

The average mutual fund holding period for equity or fixed income is only about three years. It's too short.

The deeper one delves, the worse things look for actively managed funds.

Will customers keep supporting the enormous overhead required to sustain ineffectual, unproductive stock picking across an array of thousands of individual funds devoted to every investing 'style' and economic sector or regional subgroup that some marketing idiot can dream up? Not likely. A brutal shakeout is coming and one of its revelations will be that stock picking is a grossly overrated piece of the puzzle, that cost control is what distinguishes a competitive firm from an uncompetitive one.

Mutual fund managers are trapped in this rather deadly vicious circle: the more successful they are, the more money flows into their mutual fund. Then, it is more difficult for them to beat the market averages or even to match their own past performance.

The fund scandals shined the spotlight on the fact that mutual fund managers were putting their interests ahead of the fund shareholders who trusted them, which had much more substantial consequences in the form of excessive fees and the promotion - as the market moved into the stratosphere - of technology funds and new economy funds which were soon to collapse.