Category: Quotes

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Investing is a loser’s game

I’ve said this many times before but I think it bears repeating. Investing is a loser’s game, one that is won by making the fewest mistakes. There will be times, sometimes fleeting, when the payoff from being bold is so large you have to make the bet. But those moments, periods when sentiment becomes so extreme it can’t last, are rare. The rest of the time, investors are much better served by making only small changes to avoid large mistakes. ~ Joseph Calhoun III, Alhambra Investments

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Henry Fielding | The best advice ever written

By Henry Fielding, more than two centuries ago, in The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling (1749):

Wisdom, in short, whose lessons have been represented as so hard to learn by those who were never at her school, teaches us only to extend a simple maxim universally known and followed even in the lowest life, a little farther than that life carries it. And this is not to buy at too dear a price.

Now, whoever takes this maxim abroad with him into the grand market of the world, and constantly applies it to honors, to riches, to pleasures, and to every other commodity which that market affords, is, I will venture to affirm, a wise man; and must be so acknowledged in the worldly sense of the word: for he makes the best of bargains, since in reality he purchases everything at the price of a little trouble, and carries home all the goods I have mentioned, while he keeps his health, his innocence and his reputation, the common prices which are paid for them by others, entire and to himself.

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Debt default and currency devaluation

“The first recorded credit bubble popped in 594 B.C. Athens. Threatened with a civil war of creditor versus debtor, the Athenian ruler Solon pulled down the mortgage stones to free the debtors and devalued the drachma by 27% to relieve the bankers. Every credit collapse since – from the Panic of A.D. 33 to John Law’s Mississippi Bubble to the Great Depression and many others besides – has followed Solon’s template of debt default and currency devaluation….”

~ Myrmikan Capital LLC

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Lao Tzu | Changing direction

“If you do not change direction, you may end up where you are heading.”

~ Lao Tzu, The Tao Te Ching (circa 400 BC)

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Oscar Wilde | Price versus value

Nowadays people know the price of everything and the value of nothing.

~ Oscar Wilde

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Oscar Wilde | Without order nothing can exist….

Without order nothing can exist — without chaos nothing can evolve.

~ Oscar Wilde

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Funding both sides of the war | Thomas L Friedman

Our continued addiction to fossil fuels is bolstering Vladimir Putin’s petrodictatorship and creating a situation where we in the West are — yes, say it with me now — funding both sides of the war. We fund our military aid to Ukraine with our tax dollars and some of America’s allies fund Putin’s military with purchases of his oil and gas exports.

~ Thomas L Friedman, NY Times, May 17, 2022

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Charles Mackay | Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds

Men, it has been well said, think in herds;
it will be seen that they go mad in herds,
while they only recover their senses slowly,
and one by one.

~ Charles Mackay, Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds (1852)

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Bob Farrell | 10 rules for investing

Bob Farrell

Bob Farrell wrote these 10 rules after spending more than 50 years on Wall Street. He is dead today but his rules still apply, even in the current bull market euphoria.

  1. Markets tend to return to the mean over time.
  2. Excesses in one direction will lead to an excess in the other direction
  3. There are no new eras — excesses are never permanent
  4. Exponential rapidly rising or falling markets usually go further than you think, but they do not correct by going sideways
  5. The public buys the most at the top and the least at the bottom
  6. Fear and greed are stronger than long-term resolve
  7. Markets are strongest when they are broad and weakest when they narrow to a handful of blue-chip names
  8. Bear markets have three stages — sharp down, reflexive rebound and a drawn-out fundamental downtrend
  9. When all the experts and forecasts agree — something else is going to happen
  10. Bull markets are more fun than bear markets

Hat tip to Lance Roberts at Real Investment Advice.

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Memorial Day | Gettysburg Address

Abraham Lincoln

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth upon this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.
But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate — we can not consecrate — we can not hallow — this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us — that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion — that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain — that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom — and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

~ Abraham Lincoln: Gettysburg Address, November 19, 1863

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