Paul Samuelson

Investing should be dull, like watching paint dry or grass grow. If you want excitement, take $800 and go to Las Vegas.

Fred Schwed

There are certan things that cannot be adequately explained to a virgin either with words or pictures. Nor can any description that I might offer here even approximate what it feels to lose a real chunk of money that you used to own.

Louis Bachelier

Past, present, and even discounted future events are (all) reflected in market price.

[Note: Louis Bachelier wrote this in his Ph.D. thesis at the Sorbonne in 1900. Nearly half a century later, when Nobel Laureate Paul Samuelson discovered the long-forgotten thesis, he confessed that he "oscillated . . . between regarding it as trivially obvious (and almost trivially vacuous), and regarding it as remarkably sweeping."]

Burton Malkiel

A blindfolded monkey throwing darts at a newspaper's financial pages could select a portfolio that would do just as well as one carefully selected by the experts.

[Note: This follows from the Efficient Market Hypothesis as expressed by Louis Bachelier a century ago, and later popularized by Eugene Fama in the later half of the twentieth century.]

Mark Twain

October. This is one of the peculiarly dangerous months to speculate in stocks. The others are July, January, September, April, November, May, March, June, December, August, and February.

John Maynard Keynes

Markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent.

John C. Bogle

I don't believe in market timing. I've been around this business darn near half-century, and I know I can't do it successfully. What's more, I don't know anyone else who can. In fact I don't even know anyone who knows anyone who has ever successfully timed the market over the long term.

Warren Buffett

Our stay-put behavior reflects our view that the stock market serves as a relocation center at which money is moved from the active to the patient.

We continue to make more money when snoring than when active. Inactivity strikes us as intelligent behavior.

Eugene Fama

I'd compare stock pickers to astrologers, but I don't want to bad-mouth the astrologers.

Larry Swedroe

There is at least one piece of historical data that should convince skeptics that trying to "time the market" is most likely an exercise in futility. Out of the 936 months covering the period 1926-2003, the returns for the best 66 months (7 percent) averaged over 11 percent. The returns for the remaining 870 months (93 percent) averaged less than 0.02 percent per month.

Jason Zweig

The ultimate beauty of index funds is that they get you utterly out of the business of guessing what will happen next. They enable you to say seven magic words: "I don't know, and I don't care.

Bill Schultheis

Once you remove yourself from Wall Street's complete and total obsession with trying to beat the stock market average, and accept the fact that equaling the stock market average is a rather sophisticated approach to the whole thing, building a common stock portfolio becomes an immensely gratifying experience.

Peter Lynch

If you spend 15 minutes a year studying the economy, that's 10 minutes too many.

John Rekenthaler

Save more. Trade less.

Lee Trevino

One day in 1984 my wife, Claudia, told me, 'The government gets a third and we can spend a third, but we need to save a third'. That's the smartest advice anyone ever gave me. We're rich now.

Paul B. Farrell

The math is simple: Nothing saved equals nothing invested, equals nothing for retirement. Save at least 10% if you want to be a millionaire investor.

Albert Einstein

Compound interest is the most powerful force in the universe.

Paul B. Farrell

Trust the explosive power of compounding. A 25-year-old can put roughly $3,000 in an IRA every year and with ten percent average returns retire a millionaire at 65. A 45-year-old can do it by maxing out their 401(k) with $1,250 a month. Notice the explosive power: At 65, most of your million dollar retirement portfolio will be in the growth. For example, the 25-year-old will have invested only $120,000 over 40 years; the rest is compounded interest and appreciation!

John C. Bogle

I urge you to disregard each one of them (complex ideas) in direct proportion to its complexity, its decibel level, and the conviction of its advocates that a favorable outcome is assured.

John Norstad

I have indeed found a great asset allocation calculator. It uses MPT and all the other modern models like Fama-French. It uses a huge database of expert analyst's estimates of correlations and expected returns and standard deviations and all the other information available on the entire planet. It uses the latest state-of-the-art neural network and artificial intelligence algorithms. It always produces extremely reasonable asset allocation percentages for any and all possible assets and asset classes. Anyone can easily use the calculator for free. It's called the market.

William F. Sharpe

The first thing to look at [in a mutual fund] is the expense ratio; the second thing is the turnover rate; the third thing is some measure of past performance. But if you had to look at one thing only, I'd pick expense ratio.

John C. Bogle

That message is simple: Gross return in the financial markets, minus the costs of financial intermediation, equals the net return actually delivered to investors. Whether markets are efficient or inefficient, investors as a group must fall short of the market return by precisely the amount of the aggregate costs they incur. It is the central fact of investing.

Investors have learned, and learned the hard way, that in mutual funds it's not that "you get what you pay for." It's that, almost tautologically, "you get what you don't pay for."

Leonardo DaVinci

Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.

Henry D. Thoreau

Our life is frittered away by detail. Simplify, Simplify.

Benjamin Graham

We are led to put forward to most of our readers what may appear to be an oversimplified 50-50 formula. Under this plan the guiding rule is to maintain as nearly as practicable an equal division between bond and stock holdings. We are convinced that our 50-50 version of this approach makes good sense for the defensive investor. It is extremely simple; it aims unquestionably in the right direction; it gives the follower the feeling that he is at least making some moves in response to market developments; most important of all, it will restrain him from being drawn more and more heavily into common stocks as the market rises to more and more dangerous heights.

Furthermore, a truly conservative investor will be satisfied conservative investor with the gains shown on half his portfolio in a rising market, while in a severe decline he may derive much solace from reflecting how much better off he is than many of his more venturesome friends.

Harry Markowitz

I should have computed the historic co- variances of the asset classes and drawn an efficient frontier. Instead, I split my contributions 50/50 between bonds and equities... (to) minimize my future regret.

Von Clausewitz

The greatest enemy of a good plan is the dream of a perfect plan.

Warren Buffet

To invest successfully over a lifetime does not require a stratospheric IQ, unusual business insights, or inside information. What’s needed is a sound intellectual framework for making decisions and the ability to keep emotions from corroding that framework.

By periodically investing in an index fund, for example, the know-nothing investor can actually out-perform most investment professionals. Paradoxically, when "dumb" money acknowledges its limitations, it ceases to be dumb.

David Swensen

When you look at the results on an after-fee, after-tax basis over reasonably long periods of time, there's almost no chance that you end up beating an index fund. The odds are 100 to 1.

John C. Bogle

Buy-and-hold, long-term, all-market-index strategies, implemented at rock-bottom cost, are the surest of all routes to the accumulation of wealth.