Stock Volatility Quotes

We regard using [a stock's] volatility as a measure of risk is nuts. Risk to us is 1) the risk of permanent loss of capital, or 2) the risk of inadequate return. Some great businesses have very volatile returns - for example, See's [a candy company owned by Berkshire] usually loses money in two quarters of each year - and some terrible businesses can have steady results.

Going public today is fraught with peril on many levels. One is earnings guidance. If you miss guidance, the stock price becomes very volatile. Short sellers can put a tremendous downward pressure on the stock.

Since when was the stock market an accurate barometer of anything?

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?

Stocks are a safe bet, but only if you stay invested long enough to ride out the corrections.

I'm not a stock expert by any means. Stocks go up; they go down.

There's something we calculate called an alpha, and that's the stock's return that's independent, uncorrelated to the market. And the only way you really get a high alpha is for something to zig when the market zags.

The relative illiquidity of small-company shares - which often contributes to their being undervalued - also increases their volatility.

When stock prices are rising, it's called ''momentum investing''; when they are falling, it's called ''panic.''

Share prices fluctuate more than share values.

Volatility is not something that is a great fit for Duke if you look at the level of dividend we pay.

Berkshire's whole record has been achieved without paying one ounce of attention to the efficient market theory in its hard form. And not one ounce of attention to the descendants of that idea, which came out of academic economics and went into corporate finance and morphed into such obscenities as the capital asset pricing model, which we also paid no attention to. I think you'd have to believe in the tooth fairy to believe that you could easily outperform the market by seven-percentage points per annum just by investing in high volatility stocks.

I myself saw Yahoo become a $100 billion company and then become a $10 billion company, so you always have to look at valuations with a grain of salt and understand it is a point-in-time measure.

If you knew what was going to happen in the economy, you still wouldn't necessarily know what was going to happen in the stock market.

Speculative stock movements are carried too far in both directions, frequently in the general market and at all times in at least some of the individual issues.

In the stock market (as in much of life), the beginning of wisdom is admitting your ignorance. One of the many things you cannot know about stocks is exactly when they will up or go down. Over the long term, stocks generally rise at a nice pace. History shows they double in value every seven years or so. But in the short term, stocks are just plain wild. Over periods of days, weeks and months, no one has any idea what they will do. Still, nearly all investors think they are smart enough to divine such short-term movements. This hubris frequently gets them into trouble.

I helped start a ceramics company called CPS Technologies. We took it public in 1987 at $12 a share. Three months later, there was this horrible cliff: Black Monday. Fidelity had bought 15 percent of our stock, and their algorithm caused them to dump it all onto the market that day. We dropped from $12 to $2.

Unlike cheap stocks, inexpensive asset classes have a lower chance of big drawdowns (broad asset classes don't go to zero) and a higher probability of average or better returns.