Investment Outcomes Quotes

If you're going to be an investor, you're going to make some investments where you don't have all the experience you need. But if you keep trying to get a little better over time, you'll start to make investments that are virtually certain to have a good outcome. The keys are discipline, hard work, and practice. It's like playing golf - you have to work on it.

Impact investing has become a broad umbrella that includes all investing with a focus on both financial return and social impact, but in its best form, impact investing prioritizes impact over returns and achieves outcomes that traditional investing cannot.

If you buy all the stocks selling at or below two times earnings, you will lose money on half of them because instead of making profits they will actually lose money, but you will only lose a dollar or so a share at most. Then others will be mediocre performers. But the remaining big winners will go up and produce fabulous results and also ensure a good overall result.

I can make it very clear: I get paid if we make good investments. And if we don't, I don't get paid. I have no incentive to sell our companies to Google; the entrepreneurs get to decide that. We are minority shareholders.

Venture funds get beaten up for not investing in important things. Okay, if you want venture funds to invest in important things, then don't penalize or make fun of them when those important things don't work.

Plenty of funds have fine long-term returns despite being tax-inefficient and generally costly. But a dirty secret is this: Average, no-load fund investors do much worse than the funds - or the market.

You can't make money with a consensus accurate prediction.

Just because you buy a stock and it goes up does not mean you are right. Just because you buy a stock and it goes down does not mean you are wrong.

Ultimately, we measure ourselves on the success of our investments.

All the equity investors, in total, will surely bear a performance disadvantage per annum equal to the total croupiers' costs they have jointly elected to bear. This is an inescapable fact of life. And it is also inescapable that exactly half of the investors will get a result below the median result after the croupiers' take, which median result may well be somewhere between unexciting and lousy.

Anytime you take someone's money, that puts enormous pressure. But I think if you want the most reward, you have to take the most risk.

People would be a lot more skeptical if they understood that there is an incredible amount of chance in the results that you observe for active managers. So the distribution of outcomes is enormously wide - but that's exactly what you'd expect by chance with lots of active managers who hold imperfectly diversified portfolios. The really good portfolios contain a lot of really lucky picks, and the really bad portfolios contain a lot of really unlucky picks as well as some really bad ones.

Investments - particularly those that involve the change of control of a company - only work when they work well for all parties involved.

The grim irony of investing is that we investors as a group not only don't get what we pay for, we get precisely what we don't pay for.

The returns we read about in the industry sales literature vastly diminish when we move from the theoretical world of market indexes to the real world of actually investing.