Investment Failure Quotes

You, your employer and your plan's investment managers fail to follow even the most basic rules of investing. You overtrade, chase performance, do not think long term. All of you - All Of You - have done a horrible job managing your retirement plans.

I got an E-Trade account. Turns out I can turn $1,000 into $420 in less than a week. Sure, I had to pay some fees.

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.

Speculator: One who bought stocks that went down.

Companies that banked their future on broadband - most of them are not very successful.

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.

In questioning initially whether I am a great investor, I open the door to question whether other similarly esteemed public icons like Bill Miller are as well. It seems, perhaps, that the longer and longer you keep at it in this business the more and more time you have to expose your Achilles heel - wherever and whatever that might be.

The Department of Energy made an investment that failed, and it got raked over the coals for that failed investment. This is ridiculous. The fact of the matter is, the government should be making a lot of risky investments, the majority of which are likely to fail.

I did the thing with bonds, which was about 30 million dollars, and didn't get none of the money on them.

When you find that it fails to respond adequately to your buying you don't need any better tip to sell.

Our current model of capitalism and the dominant ideas in policy making have led to a failure of investment by both the public and the private sector in the things that drive productivity, and which affect its distribution.

The reason is they failed to learned the primary lesson we should have learned from when Long Term Capital Management went belly up ten years ago. That is, investments that seem uncorrelated can be correlated simply because we're interested in it.

You don't tell a player you can't monitor your investments for a month. There's no way you're going to have a billion-dollar investment and never fail to monitor it for a period of time.

It has now become a status symbol among the rich to say that you got ripped off by Bernie Madoff, because everybody is losing money in the market, everybody is, but it makes you special and unique if you lost money because of Madoff. These people don't think it makes 'em look stupid. It continues to elevate their status, they think.

I don't want to be one of those guys that you see who made $4 million, invested $3.5 million, and now you work at Wendy's.

The failure to invest in youth reflects a lack of compassion and a colossal failure of common sense.

The statistics for investing in small businesses are such that the vast majority fail.

A decade ago, I really did believe that the average investor could do it himself. I was wrong. I've come to the sad conclusion that only a tiny minority, at most one percent, are capable of pulling it off. Heck, if Helen Young Hayes, Robert Sanborn, Julian Robertson, and the nation's largest pension funds can't get it right, what chance does John Q. Investor have?

We have not known a single person who has consistently or lastingly make money by thus "following the market". We do not hesitate to declare this approach is as fallacious as it is popular.

I lost $4 million of other people's money between the ages of 24 and 26.

It is worth pointing out that assuredly not more than one person out of a hundred who stayed in the market after after 1925 emerged from it with a net profit and that the speculative losses taken were appalling.