621 Quotes About Investing

The behavior gap is why the average investor meaningfully underperforms the average returns for asset classes over time. Yet, many can’t resist the temptation of irrational behavior during nerve-racking volatility and irrational exuberance.

[You’ll] learn how to improve your investment experience, increase returns formerly sacrificed to misbehavior, and worry less about “The economy” as you become increasingly focused on “My economy.

Other people’s pockets are our money’s dream home.

The psychology of individuals – warts and all – must be a central consideration in the formulation of any practical investing approach. The good news here is that others’ misbehavior will consistently and systematically create opportunities for you. The bad news is that you are prone to all of the same quirks and are just as likely, in the absence of strict adherence to the rules, to create the same opportunities for others.

A latte a day keeps retirement away

Imagine a world where you could gain more knowledge by reading fewer books, see more of the world by minimizing travel and get more fit by doing less exercise. Certainly, a world where doing less gets you more is highly inconsistent with much of our lived experience, but is just the way Wall Street Bizarro World operates. If we are to learn to live in WSBW (and we must), one of the primary lessons to be learned is to do less than we think we should.

We often analogize our brains to computers – impartial storage apparatus tasked with housing and calling up information objectively. In reality, our brains are far more like beer goggles than supercomputers, which means that the intelligent investor must take precautions to ensure the emotion of the moment is not warping his sense of reality.

[The] more confidence an expert had, the worse his predictions tended to be and that the more famous an expert was, the worse her predictions were on average. Only in Wall Street Bizarro World would we expect confident experts to be stupid and famous thought leaders to be deserving of infamy.

The lessons for behavioral investors are unavoidable: you must automate your process wherever possible and avoid bias in the selection of people and processes. To do otherwise is to believe that professional money managers are actually above the fray of human bias, when the evidence shows us otherwise.