Finance Market Quotes

The government that came into power after the April 1994 elections was going to need a budget. It was drafted by our finance minister, Derek Keys, and he convinced them of the necessity to stay within the free-market principles that had been in force in South Africa for decades. ~ F. W. De Klerk

Right, you see that girl over there, the one in that group that keeps looking right at you?'...'Right, let's say I'm convinced she's wearing black knickers - she looks like a black knickers kind of gal to me - and I'm so sure that's what she's wearing, so positive of that sartorial fact, I want to bet a million dollars on it. The trouble is, if I'm wrong, I'm wiped out. So I also bet she's wearing knickers that aren't black, but are any one of a whole basket of colours - let's say I put nine hundred and fifty thousand dollars on that possibility: that's the rest of the market; that's the hedge. This is a crude example, okay, in every sense, but hear me out. Now if I'm right, I make fifty K, but even if I'm wrong I'm going to lose fifty K, because I'm hedged. And because ninety-five per cent of my million dollars is not in use - I'm never going to be called on to show it: the only risk is in the spread - I can make similar bets with other people. Or I can bet it on something else entirely. And the beauty of it is I don't have to be right all the time - if I can just get the colour of her underwear right fifty-five per cent of the time I'm going to wind up very rich... ~ Robert Harris

The financial markets generally are unpredictable. So that one has to have different scenarios ... The idea that you can actually predict what's going to happen contradicts my way of looking at the market. ~ George Soros

The biggest public fallacy is that the market is always right. The market is nearly always wrong. I can assure you of that. ~ Jim Rogers

Since the 1970s, the battlefields on which the contradictions of democratic capitalism are fought out have become ever more complex, making it exceedingly difficult for anyone outside the political and financial elites to recognize the underlying interests and identify their own. While this may generate apathy on the mass level and thereby make life easier for the elites, there is no relying on it, in a world in which blind compliance with financial investors is propounded as the only rational and responsible behavior. To those who refuse to be talked out of other social rationalities and responsibilities, such a world may appear simply absurd - at which the only rational and responsible conduct to throw as many as wrenches as into the works of haute finance. Where democracy as we know it is effectively suspended, as it already is in countries like Greece, Ireland, and Portugal, street riots and popular insurrection may be the last remaining mode of political expression for those devoid of market power. Should we hope in the name of democracy that we will soon have the opportunity to observe a few more examples? ~ Wolfgang Streeck

We can't all be bakers or chefs. Many of us have modest ambitions. But we can all buy a piece of the pie. ~ Amah Lambert

Let's face a historical truth: we have never had a "free market", we have always had government intervention in the economy, and indeed that intervention has been welcomed by the captains of finance and industry. They had no quarrel with "big government" when it served their needs. ~ Howard Zinn

Nothing brings home the fragility of the banking system or the potency of a financial crisis more vividly than writing about these issues from the eye of the storm. Watching the world's central bankers and finance officials grappling with the current situation - trying one thing after another to restore confidence, throwing everything they can at the problem, coping daily with unexpected and startling shifts in market sentiment - reinforces the lesson that there is no magic bullet or simple formula for dealing with financial panics. ~ Liaquat Ahamed

The stock market cares about only one thing above all else: anticipated earnings. If companies make more money, their share prices eventually rise. The stock price is simply a reflection of a company's earning power. Everything else is noise. ~ Peter Mallouk

Smart Risk will shatter the emotional myths to investing and help Canadians see the opportunities in today's volatile market. ~ Maili Wong

I was convinced that I was totally incompetent in predicting market prices - but that others were generally incompetent also but did not know it, or did not know they were taking massive risks. Most traders were just "picking pennies in front of a steamroller," exposing themselves to the high-impact rare event yet sleeping like babies, unaware of it. ~ Nassem Nicholas Taleb

Corruption,' Jordan Belfort believes, 'is endemic to human being. I mean, even men in monasteries - where enticement is hard to come by – even men in those circumstances have sex with other men and abuse children. Look at the Catholic Church! Man is an imperfect animal and he is corruptible, okay? And in finance, the liquid nature of the market makes corruption very easy. On Wall Street, this liquidity is so in your face -' he suddenly grits his teeth - 'that if you have even the slightest predisposition to the dark side, you become corrupted. In addition to which, those attracted to Wall Street have a predisposition to greed. ~ Antonella Gambotto-Burke

For those of us in the financial world, Black Friday has a strong negative connotation, referring to a stock market catastrophe. ~ Mark Skousen

There is no other proposition in economics that has more solid empirical evidence supporting it than the Efficient Market Hypothesis ... In the literature of finance, accounting, and the economics of uncertainty, the EMH is accepted as a fact of life. ~ Michael Jensen

Personal qualities today are increasingly marginalized in favor of technocratic, market-driven skills. Instead, finance is the new courage, branding is the new compassion, and coding is the new contemplation. ~ Andrew Yang

Customers are a great way to finance a business for many reasons. First, customer financing is typically non dilutive. They want something from you other than equity in your business. Customers also help you fit your product to the market. And customers will help debug and improve the quality of the product. ~ Fred Wilson

That effort to undermine competitive markets is no better in the market for labor than it is for goods and services. ~ Richard A. Epstein

Gold belongs only in the portfolios of fearmongers and speculators. If you own gold in your portfolio, expect to not get paid an income, pay higher taxes on your returns, take a more volatile ride than the stock market, and get a long-term return lower than bonds. ~ Peter Mallouk

One of the funny things about the stock market is that every time one person buys, another sells, and both think they are astute. ~ William Feather

There is a crucially important difference about playing the game of investing compared to virtually any other activity. Most of us have no chance of being as good as the average in any pursuit where others practice and hone skills for many, many hours. But we can be as good as the average investor in the stock market with no practice at all.
Jeremy Siegel, Professor of Finance, Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, and author of Stocks for the Long Run ~ Taylor Larimore

Reliability investing requires finding companies trading below their inherent worth
stocks with strong fundamentals including earnings, dividends, book value, and cash flow selling at bargain prices give their quality. ~ Amah Lambert

Finance is concerned with the relations between the values of securities and their risk, and with the behavior of those values. It aspires to be a practical, like physics or chemistry or electrical engineering. As John Maynard Keynes once remarked about economics, "If economists could manage to get themselves thought of as humble, competent people on a level with dentists, that would be splendid." Dentists rely on science, engineering, empirical knowledge, and heuristics, and there are no theorems in dentistry. Similarly, one would hope that nance would be concerned with laws rather than theorems, with behavior rather than assumptions. One doesn't seriously describe the behavior of a market with theorems. ~ Emanuel Derman

The Keynesian world is a world in which there are two distinct classes of actors: the skilled investor, 'who, unperturbed by the prevailing pastime, continues to purchase investments on the best genuine long-term expectations he can frame', and, on the other hand, the ignorant 'game-player'. It does not seem to have occurred to Keynes that either of these two may learn from the other, and that, in particular, company directors and even the managers of investment trusts may be the wiser for learning from the market what it thinks about their actions. In this Keynesian world the managers and directors already know all about the future and have little to gain by devoting their attention to the misera plebs of the market. In fact, Keynes strongly feels that they should not! This pseudo-Platonic view of the world of high finance forms, we feel, an essential part of what Schumpeter called the 'Keynesian vision'. This view ignores progress through exchange of knowledge because the ones know all there is to be known whilst the others never learn anything. ~ Ludwig Lachmann

We've taken the view that if the rest of the world would democratize and create market economies, that would spread the benefits of prosperity around the world, and that it would enhance our own prosperity, and our own stability and security, as well. ~ Jeffrey Sachs

We find the same situation in the economy. On the one hand, the battered remnants of production and the real economy; on the other, the circulation of gigantic amounts of virtual capital. But the two are so disconnected that the misfortunes which beset that capital – stock market crashes and other financial debacles – do not bring about the collapse of real economies any more. It is the same in the political sphere: scandals, corruption and the general decline in standards have no decisive effects in a split society, where responsibility (the possibility that the two parties may respond to each other) is no longer part of the game.
This paradoxical situation is in a sense beneficial: it protects civil society (what remains of it) from the vicissitudes of the political sphere, just as it protects the economy (what remains of it) from the random fluctuations of the Stock Exchange and international finance. The immunity of the one creates a reciprocal immunity in the other – a mirror indifference. Better: real society is losing interest in the political class, while nonetheless availing itself of the spectacle. At last, then, the media have some use, and the 'society of the spectacle' assumes its full meaning in this fierce irony: the masses availing themselves of the spectacle of the dysfunctionings of representation through the random twists in the story of the political class's corruption. All that remains now to the politicians is the obligation to sacrifice themselves ~ Jean Baudrillard

Small- and medium-sized businesses need access to a diverse range of finance options, including non-bank lending. These new forms of finance are still small in scale today but they should, over time, bring additional choice and greater competition to the lending market. ~ Vince Cable

We should never lose sight of the underlying essence of a market-a place where buyers and sellers come together. Every other feature-whether crafted by tradition or technology-exists only to serve that primary purpose. ~ Arthur Levitt Jr

Under the tenets of behavioral finance, markets are not always efficient. It is human behavior that moves markets and not the universal information shared by market participants. ~ Gary Antonacci

We had a booming stock market in 1929 and then went into the world's greatest depression. We have a booming stock market in 1999. Will the bubble somehow burst, and then we enter depression? Well, some things are not different. ~ Jeffrey Sachs

If vampire A loaned vampire B ten centilitres of blood, B will repay the same amount. Nor do vampires use loans in order to finance new businesses or encourage growth in the blood-sucking market. Because the blood is produced by other animals, the vampires have no way of increasing production. Though the blood market has its ups and downs, vampires cannot presume that in 2017 there will be 3 per cent more blood than in 2016, and that in 2018 the blood market will again grow by 3 per cent. Consequently, vampires don't believe in growth.1 For millions of years of evolution humans lived under conditions similar to those of vampires, foxes and rabbits. Hence humans too find it difficult to believe in growth. The ~ Yuval Noah Harari

The New Finance focused on the market's major systematic mistake. In failing to appreciate the strength of competitive forces in a market economy, it over estimates the length of the short run. In doing so, it overreacts to records of success and failure for individual companies, driving the prices of successful firms too high and their unsuccessful counterparts too low. ~ Robert Haugen

They don't try to trade 'reality', they try to trade
other people's perceptions of reality. If a market is dominated by enough technical traders, it could lapse into a 'postmodern' state, with traders trading perceptions of perceptions of reality. ~ Brett Scott

Investing in the market without knowing what stage it is in is like selling life insurance to 20 year olds and 80 year olds at the same premium. ~ Victor Sperandeo

Money? It's the oh-so-simple miracle that allows you to take home veal in your shopping bag…', the Trader-Knights repeat, forgetting that behind the head of veal or the pork cutlet there is a futures market in livestock and pork bellies, and that behind that market looms the futures market of exchange rates, interest rates and so many other levels all the way down to absolute volatility, all utterly inaccessible to those bit-part players in the great comedy of trading, the small individual shareholders. ~ Gilles Châtelet