Indexes Quotes

To prove that Wall Street is an early omen of movements still to come in GNP, commentators quote economic studies alleging that market downturns predicted four out of the last five recessions. That is an understatement. Wall Street indexes predicted nine out of the last five recessions! And its mistakes were beauties. ~ Paul Samuelson

[With] closet indexing ... you're paying a manager a fortune and he has 85% of his assets invested parallel to the indexes. If you have such a system, you're being played for a sucker. ~ Charlie Munger

So tell me, Ray, what are the percentages you would put in stocks? What percentage in gold? and so on."...
"First, he said, we need 30% in stocks (for instance, the S&P 500 or other indexes for further diversification in this basket)...
"Then you need long-term government bonds. Fifteen percent in intermediate term [seven- to ten-year Treasuries] and forty percent in long-term bonds [20- to 25-year Treasuries]."...
He rounded out the portfolio with 7.5% in gold and 7.5% in commodities...
Lastly, the portfolio must be rebalanced. Meaning, when one segment does well, you must sell a portion and reallocate back to the original allocation. This should be done at least annually, and, if done properly, can actually increase tax efficiency. p390 ~ Tony Robbins

China frequently confounds stock market prognosticators because it has a penchant for straying markedly from other broad global indexes year-by-year over the decades - even from emerging markets. It's hit or miss. ~ Kenneth Fisher

Google indexes the world's information. ~ Jason Calacanis

Here you have a new technology, and if that technology is going to work, you must allow people to provide central indexes of the data. It's just like a newspaper that publishes classified ads. ~ David Boies

The man who publishes a book without an index ought to be damned 10 miles beyond hell, where the Devil himself cannot get for stinging nettles. ~ John Baynes

For the success,
Although particular, shall give a scantling
Of good or bad unto the general;
And in such indexes, although small pricks
To their subsequent volumes, there is seen
The baby figure of the giant mass
Of things to come at large. ~ William Shakespeare

Index-learning turns no student pale,
Yet holds the eel of Science by the tail.
Index-learning is a term used to mock pretenders who acquire superficial knowledge merely by consulting indexes. ~ Alexander Pope

I'm making a case against how money managers are handling customers' money. The objective of the customer is not being met if the fund managers are diversifying their assets into hundreds of businesses. If they do this, they are typically performing close to the indexes. But that's not the way wealth is created. ~ Michael Lee-Chin

I was looking at books and reading the indexes and finding a next book and reading that book, and then from that index ... It was a version of surfing the internet before the internet. I was surfing the New York Public Library. It was back when you had to fill out a form and put it in a chute. ~ Lisa Yuskavage

Trying to pick individual stocks is a trap. I can't do it. Warren Buffett can, but hardly anyone else can beat the indexes over a long period of time. ~ Ben Stein

No less characteristic in a democracy is social justice. This demands a solution to the frightening indexes of infant mortality, of malnutrition, lack of education illiteracy, wages not sufficient to sustain life ~ Rigoberta Menchu

To paraphrase an old philosophical question, if a tree falls on the Internet and no search engine indexes it, does it make any noise? ~ Marc Goodman

Inflammation in the body) is a very healthy 0.01, and all of my other indexes (for heart disease, diabetes, and other conditions) are at ideal levels. ~ Ray Kurzweil

I think that intellectuals who end up in hell will have to read page proofs and check indexes there. ~ Edward Teller

In fact, some people who rate very high marks on the ego-based indexes of success are the ones I find most difficult to be around - and totally uninspiring ~ Wayne W. Dyer

If we can dispel the delusion that learning about computers should be an activity of fiddling with array indexes and worrying whether X is an integer or a real number, we can begin to focus on programming as a source of ideas. ~ Hal Abelson

Well, I've never met an indexer any more than I've met a real writer. I'm impressed." Miss Finch's tone had changed, and she was suddenly leaning toward me, almost half over the counter. "Tell me, do you make any real money at this job, writing indexes for books? ~ Larry D. Sweazy

Sometimes I think my ability to concentrate is being nibbled away by the internet; other times I think it's being gulped down in huge, Jaws-shaped chunks. In those quaint days before the internet, once you made it to your desk there wasn't much to distract you. You could sit there working or you could just sit there. Now you sit down and there's a universe of possibilities – many of them obscurely relevant to the work you should be getting on with – to tempt you. To think that I can be sitting here, trying to write something about Ingmar Bergman and, a moment later, on the merest whim, can be watching a clip from a Swedish documentary about Don Cherry – that is a miracle (albeit one with a very potent side-effect, namely that it's unlikely I'll ever have the patience to sit through an entire Bergman film again).

Then there's the outsourcing of memory. From the age of 16, I got into the habit of memorising passages of poetry and compiling detailed indexes in the backs of books of prose. So if there was a passage I couldn't remember, I would spend hours going through my books, seeking it out. Now, in what TS Eliot, with great prescience, called "this twittering world", I just google the key phrase of the half-remembered quote. Which is great, but it's drained some of the purpose from my life.

Exactly the same thing has happened now that it's possible to get hold of out-of-print books instantly on the web. That's great too. But one of the side incentives to ~ Geoff Dyer