Investment Skill Quotes

You don't need to be a rocket scientist. Investing is not a game where the guy with the 160 IQ beats the guy with 130 IQ.

Investing in stocks is an art, not a science, and people who've been trained to rigidly quantify everything have a big disadvantage.

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

Investing in a poker game and investing in stocks, at least the way I do it, it's a very similar skillset.

Great investors need to have the right combination of intuition, business sense and investment talent.

Although professionals are able to extract a considerable amount of wealth from amateurs, few stock pickers, if any, have the skill needed to beat the market consistently, year after year.

The great skill of investment is to know when the right time is to get out. Getting in's easy.

The man I respect the most in the business - and he's in the hedge fund business - is probably Stan Druckenmiller. He's just so smart and so good and so up on everything. I think he's fantastic investor.

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?

After costs, only the top 3% of managers produce a return that indicates they have sufficient skill to just cover their costs, which means that going forward, and despite extraordinary past returns, even the top performers are expected to be only as good as a low-cost passive index fund. The other 97% can be expected to do worse.