30 Legendary Investors — and Their Investing Quotes and Advice

Investing, despite its incredible potential for building massive and passive wealth and the paramount recommendation from financial experts, is no joke. It is a test of many things.

While entrepreneurs mainly capitalize on innovative and profitable business opportunities, investors focus on generating returns on investments in existing instruments through wise financial decisions. Being one requires skills to deal with technicalities, courage to take risks, and emotional control to ride out the market tides.

If you’re planning to dip your toes into the waters of investing, which may be the best decision you’ve ever had, or you’ve swum already, then you might need some onboarding inspirations or additional pieces of advice from these world’s most famous and legendary investors and traders.

Benjamin Graham (The Father of Value Investing)

Benjamin Graham, widely known as the ‘father of value investing’ was a British-born American economist, professor, and investor whose research and publications in securities, particularly the monumental book, The Intelligent Investor, laid the groundwork for in-depth fundamental valuation used in stock analysis today by many stock investors and traders. He was also a mentor to billionaire investors, including Warren Buffett. 

Here are Benjamin Graham’s top quotes and advice on investing: 

• The market is a pendulum that forever swings between unsustainable optimism (which makes stocks too expensive) and unjustified pessimism (which makes them too cheap). The intelligent investor is a realist who sells to optimists and buys from pessimists.
• Successful investing is about managing risk, not avoiding it.
• In the short run, the market is a voting machine, but in the long run, it is a weighing machine.
• An investment operation is one which, upon thorough analysis, promises safety of principal and an adequate return. Operations not meeting these requirements are speculative.
• Investing isn’t about beating others at their game. It’s about controlling yourself at your own game.
• People who invest make money for themselves; people who speculate make money for their brokers.
• A stock is not just a ticker symbol or an electronic blip; it is an ownership interest in an actual business with an underlying value that does not depend on its share price.
• The intelligent investor realizes that stocks become more risky, not less, as their prices rise—and less risky, not more, as their prices fall. The intelligent investor dreads a bull market since it makes stocks more costly to buy. And conversely (so long as you keep enough cash on hand to meet your spending needs), you should welcome a bear market since it puts stocks back on sale.
• The best way to measure your investing success is not by whether you’re beating the market but by whether you’ve put in place a financial plan and a behavioral discipline that are likely to get you where you want to go. In the end, what matters isn’t crossing the finish line before anybody else but just making sure that you do cross it.
• To be an investor, you must be a believer in a better tomorrow.
• To have a true investment, there must be a true margin of safety. And a true margin of safety is one that can be demonstrated by figures, by persuasive reasoning, and by reference to a body of actual experience.
• If you are shopping for common stocks, choose them the way you would buy groceries, not the way you would buy perfume.

Bill Ackman (The Activist Investor)

William Albert Ackman is an American billionaire investor, hedge fund manager, and the founder and CEO of Pershing Square Capital Management, a London-based hedge fund management company. He is widely known for his activism in corporate governance, investing heavily in undervalued and mismanaged companies and then pushing for management changes to bring out shareholder value.

Here are Bill Ackman’s top quotes and advice on investing: 

• Investing is a business where you can look very silly for a long period of time before you are proven right.
• I’m not emotional about investments. Investing is something where you have to be purely rational and not let emotion affect your decision making – just the facts.
• If I believe that I am right, I will take it to the end of the earth until I am proven right.
• Experience is making mistakes and learning from them.
• Short-term market and economic prognostication is largely a fool’s errand; we invest according to a strategy that makes the need to rely on the short-term market or economic assessments largely irrelevant.
• In order to be successful, you have to make sure that being rejected doesn’t bother you at all.
• I am always prepared to do the right thing regardless of what other people think.
• I think a very good system in a world with a lot of passive investors is one in which there are at least a few entrepreneurial investors, prepared to say what they think, prepared to propose a change in management, change in strategy, change in cost structure, capital structure.
• You should surround yourself with people that believe in you, in life, and in business.
• I think good private equity investors create a lot more economic value than they destroy.
• I’m an extremely, extremely persistent person. Extremely. And when I believe I am right, and it is important, I will go to the end of the earth.
• Investing is one of the few things you can learn on your own

Bill Gross (The Bond King)

William Hunt Gross is a renowned American bond investor, fund manager, and the co-founder of Pacific Investment Management Company (PIMCO). As a bond investor, he is widely credited for his aggressive bond investing and turning the quiet bond market into a destabilized game of high risks and rewards.

Here are Bill Gross’s top quotes and advice on investing: 

• The market can move for irrational reasons, and you have to be prepared for that.
• You need to make big bets when the odds are in your favor — not big enough to ruin you, but big enough to make a difference.
• Both from the standpoint of stocks and bonds, an investor wants to go where the growth is.
• Finding the best person or the best organization to invest your money is one of the most important financial decisions you’ll ever make.
• Stocks historically return more than almost all other alternative investments, but only when priced right when the race begins.
• Bonds despite their ridiculous yields will not easily be threatened with a new bear market.
• We’re in a race. We just want to scale as fast as possible.
• Bonds as an asset class will always be needed, and not just by insurance companies and pension funds but by aging boomers.
• Whether a tops-down or bottoms-up investor in bonds, stocks, or private equity, the standard analysis tends to judge an investor or his firm on the basis of how the bullish or bearish aspects of the cycle were managed.
• If financial assets no longer work for you at a rate far and above the rate of true wealth creation, then you must work longer for your money.
• Bond investors are the vampires of the investment world. They love decay, recession — anything that leads to low inflation and the protection of the real value of their loans.
• Companies typically borrow money at less than their return on equity and therefore compound their return at the expense of lenders.

Carl Icahn (The Notorious Corporate Raider and Activist Investor)

Carl Celian Icahn is an American financier, hedge fund manager, and the founder and controlling shareholder of Icahn Enterprises, a diversified conglomerate holding company. As a notorious corporate raider and activist investor, he would acquire the majority shares of companies he believed suffered from mismanagement. Then, he would use his influence to make changes within the board and the operations.

Here are Carl Icahn’s top quotes and advice on investing: 

• In risk, there is reward.
• When most investors, including the pros, all agree on something, they’re usually wrong.
• When nobody wants something, that creates an opportunity.
• The cardinal rule is to have enough capital at the end of the day.
• Don’t confuse luck with skill when judging others, and especially when judging yourself.
• We want these assets to be productive. We buy them. We own them. To say we care only about the short term is wrong. What I care about is seeing these assets in the best hands.
• You have to buy things where the rest of the world is looking at you and thinking you’re a little bit crazy. You’re going against the trend. A lot of times, events are overblown. Overblown on the good side, overblown on the bad side.
• The winning, that’s not the motivation for me. The motivation is finding something you know is going be good, and the odds are greatly in your favor. Winning is a bit of a letdown, actually. You did it all. Now it worked. On to the next one.
• The consensus thinking is generally wrong. If you go with a trend, the momentum always falls apart on you. So I buy companies that are not glamorous and usually out of favor. It is even better if the whole industry is out of favor.
• I look at companies as businesses, while Wall Street analysts look for quarterly earnings performance. I buy assets and potential productivity.  
• When you start using the market as a casino, that’s a huge mistake.
• I can’t sit here too long. I gotta go buy some stock.

Carlos Slim (The Richest Man in Latin America)

Carlos Slim Helú is a Mexican business tycoon, investor, and prominent philanthropist who derives his fortune from Grupo Carso, one of Latin America’s largest conglomerates with extensive holdings in many Mexican companies. 

Here are Carlos Slim’s top quotes and advice on investing: 

• When there is a crisis, that’s when some are interested in getting out, and that’s when we are interested in getting in.
• Anyone who is not investing now is missing a tremendous opportunity.
• I learned from my father that you continue to invest and reinvest in your business – including during crises.
• In business, you invest when things are not in good shape. When you invest at these times, you take a better position than your competitors. When there is a recession and your competition does not invest, they are giving you the advantage.
• All times are a good time for those who know how to work and have the tools to do so.
• Mistakes are normal and human. Make them small, accept them, correct them, and forget them.
• Firm and patient optimism always yields its rewards.
• Wealth should be created by investing to create more wealth. Income is the fruit of wealth. If you do not do that, you will not have more income.
• Invest prodigiously in your business, especially when others aren’t investing in theirs, and do so for the long term.
• Be optimistic and not guided by your fears.
• Courage taught me no matter how bad a crisis gets, any sound investment will eventually pay off.
• Focus on essentials and try not to get distracted and bogged down by things that don’t add value to the bottom line.

Cathie Wood (The Tech Investor)

Catherine Duddy Wood is an American tech investor and the founder and CEO of Ark Invest, a Florida-based investment management firm that manages exchange-traded funds (ETFs). She focuses on thematic investment strategies based on overarching long-term trends and disruptors likely to impact the world’s evolution.

Here are Cathie Wood’s top quotes and advice on investing: 

• The strongest bull markets I’ve been in are built on walls of worry.
• A correction is a great time to determine what are our high conviction names.
• Corrections are good; they keep us all humble.
• Technologically enabled innovation follows declining cost curves and prices that enable exponential growth opportunities for mass markets. Stay on the right side of change!
• Drowning out naysayers and staying focused is a prerequisite for success.
• Well, in terms of our companies, we are very involved in the innovation space. We are not afraid as an investor, we’re not afraid of dilution, if we, if we think they’re doing it for the right reason.
• We believe that disruptive products and services are better, cheaper, and faster and thus, typically gain significant share during recessions.
• Seeking to relive the glory of your last great judgment call is a mistake that investors and traders in the financial business make repeatedly.
• The economy is really strong, but probably mismeasured as most statistics were developed during the industrial age. We’re in the digital age.
• I wouldn’t bet against human beings enabled by technology. History is on our side.
• Passive and benchmark-sensitive investing is contributing to the most massive misallocation of capital in history. Investing in companies because of their past successes risks putting the US at a serious competitive disadvantage to countries like China.
• Concentration doesn’t always mean higher risks.

Chamath Palihapitiya (The SPAC King)

Chamath Palihapitiya is a Sri Lankan-born Canadian and American venture capitalist, engineer, and the founder and CEO of Social Capital. He invests in fields mostly ignored by many such as health, financial services, and education. SPACs or special purpose acquisition companies, as usually attached to his name, do not have underlying operating businesses and assets other than cash and limited investments, including the proceeds from the IPO.

Here are Chamath Palihapitiya’s top quotes and advice on investing:

• Something like bitcoin is really important because it is not correlated to the rest of the market.
• Your job as a smart investor is to separate the facts and the news from the fiction and the noise.
• Companies are transcending power now. We are becoming the eminent vehicles for change and influence and capital structures that matter. If companies shut down, the stock market would collapse.
• Valuable companies take decades to build.
• Good investors have to choose how to allocate their mind share with the precious capital they have.
• There’s a handful of exceptionally good companies, but there’s always one company that’s the best.
• Much like Warren Buffett has said very famously – he doesn’t buy technology stocks because he doesn’t understand them- I will not buy consumer goods companies because I do not understand them.
• Betting against entrepreneurs who are changing the world has never been a profitable endeavor.
• If the investors themselves are not sophisticated, if they themselves are not putting a lot of their own money to work, if they themselves don’t understand the continuum of capital and how different parts of the capital structures react differently, then they’re basically worthless. They’re not going to give great advice to these entrepreneurs who then need it. So that is, unfortunately, the cycle we’re in, and we have to break the cycle.
• We need to divorce ourselves from venture capital as an occupation and focus on using capital as a way to take really big bets on things that just seem totally audacious.
• This is how you entrench inequality: We let the poor ‘invest’ in lottery tickets, sports gambling, and casinos but not startups.
• In terms of short-selling, I buy the fact that it’s an important part of the market. I’m not a huge fan of it.

Charlie Munger (Warren Buffett’s Right-Hand Man)

Charles Thomas Munger is an American businessman, investor, philanthropist, and widely recognized as the vice chairman of Berkshire Hathaway and the right-hand man of Warren Buffett. He has been instrumental in the company’s growth into a giant diversified holding firm with over $700 billion market capitalization.

Here are Charlie Munger’s top quotes and advice on investing: 

• The big money is not in the buying or selling but in the waiting.
• A lot of people with high IQs are terrible investors because they’ve got terrible temperaments.
• All intelligent investing is value investing, acquiring more than you are paying for. You must value the business in order to value the stock.
• Always take the high road; it’s far less crowded.
• A great business at a fair price is superior to a fair business at a great price.
• People calculate too much and think too little.
• It’s not supposed to be easy. Anyone who finds it easy is stupid.
• This habit of committing far more time to learning and thinking than to doing is no accident.
• We have three baskets for investing: yes, no, and too tough to understand.
• Live within your income and save so that you can invest. Learn what you need to learn.
• Most people are too fretful; they worry too much. Success means being very patient but aggressive when it’s time.
• You’re looking for a mispriced gamble. That’s what investing is. And you have to know enough to know whether the gamble is mispriced. That’s value investing.

David Einhorn (The Activist Investor and Eminent Short-Selling Speculator)

David Einhorn is an American investor, hedge fund manager, philanthropist, and the founder and president of Greenlight Capital, a long-short value-oriented hedge fund invested in equities and corporate debt offerings. He is one of Wall Street’s most closely watched stock investors due to his bold investment calls, both long and short.

Here are David Einhorn’s top quotes and advice on investing: 

• As an investor, my job is to figure out what will happen rather than what should happen.
• The loss was not bad luck. It was bad analysis.
• In the real world, illiquid assets carry a discount.
• What is uncertain is how much further the bubble can expand and what might pop it.
• In my business investing, you are buying a stock, and someone else is selling the stock. Right there, that’s like a debate. Is the stock going up, or is it going to go down?
• We take the traditional value investor’s process and just flip it around a little bit. The traditional value investor asks ‘Is this cheap?’ and then ‘Why is it cheap?’ We start by identifying a reason something might be mispriced, and then if we find a reason why something is likely mispriced, then we make a determination whether it’s cheap.
• We never invent new reasons to continue with a position when the original reasons are no longer available.
• We believe in constructing the portfolio so that we put our biggest amount of money in our highest-conviction idea, and then we view the other ideas relative to that.
• We try not to have many investing ‘rules,’ but there is one that has served us well: If we decide we were wrong about something, in terms of why we did it, we exit, period.
• You have a certain set of facts and you are looking for situations where you have an edge, whether the edge is psychological or statistical.
• Any stock investment can turn out to be a loser no matter how large the edge appears.
• Market extremes occur when it becomes too expensive in the short term to hold for the long term.

George Soros (The Man Who Broke the Bank of England)

George Soros is a Hungarian-American businessman and philanthropist named by Forbes as ‘the most generous giver.’ He is most famous for a single-day gain of $1 billion during the 1992 Black Wednesday UK currency crisis, which he made by short-selling US$10 worth of British pounds sterling.

Here are George Soros’s top quotes and advice on investing: 

• I’m only rich because I know when I’m wrong. I basically have survived by recognizing my mistakes.
• Markets are constantly in a state of uncertainty and flux, and money is made by discounting the obvious and betting on the unexpected.
• We try to catch new trends early, and in later stages, we try to catch trend reversals. Therefore, we tend to stabilize rather than destabilize the market. We are not doing this as a public service. It is our style of making money.
• 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 markets.
• The only thing that could hurt me is if my success encouraged me to return to my childhood fantasies of omnipotence — but that is not likely to happen as long as I remain engaged in the financial markets because they constantly remind me of my limitations.
• It’s not whether you’re right or wrong but how much money you make when you’re right and how much you lose when you’re wrong.
• There is a powerful case for the market mechanism, but it is not that markets are perfect; it is that in a world dominated by imperfect understanding, markets provide an efficient feedback mechanism for evaluating the results of one’s decisions and correcting mistakes.
• My peculiarity is that I don’t have a particular style of investing or, more exactly, I try to change my style to fit the conditions.
• It is much easier to put existing resources to better use than to develop resources where they do not exist.
• Start by assuming the market is always wrong, so if you copy everybody else on Wall Street, you’re doomed to do poorly.
• If investing is entertaining, if you’re having fun, you’re probably not making any money. Good investing is boring.
• When you sell options, you get paid for assuming risk. That can be a profitable business, but it does not mix well with the risks inherent in a leveraged portfolio.

Guo Guangchang (China’s Warren Buffett)

Guo Guangchang is a Chinese businessman, investor, and the co-founder and chairman of Fosun International Limited, a Chinese multinational conglomerate holding company interested in insurance, equity investments, asset management, fashion, media, and real estate.

Here are Guo Guangchang’s top quotes and advice on investing: 

• Keeping the balance of fast-growing and smooth-growing is always important. It’s almost an art.
• You have to maintain the balance between fast growth and smooth growth. It’s like driving a car and knowing when to balance the gas pedal and the brake.
• No one holds a permanent speed advantage in the market due to the limits of human intelligence and vision. Your advantage comes from your ability to feel the change faster and take decisive action faster.
• I feel that doing business is just like practicing Buddhism. Money is not your only purpose. Your purpose is to make things better for other people, and in the end, money will come as a result.
• The aim of tai chi is not to strike first to gain dominance over an opponent but to wait and hit at the right moment.

Guy Spier (The Value Investor)

Guy Spier is a South African-born Zurich-based investor and the manager of the Aquamarine Fund. His transformations and self-realizations led him from an investment banking job with a third-rate firm to managing his fund, which has generated massive returns for his investors.

Here are Guy Spier’s top quotes and advice on investing: 

• People will always stop you doing the right thing if it’s unconventional.
• Our environment is much stronger than our intellect. Remarkably few investors—either amateur or professional—truly understand this critical point.
• The entire pursuit of value investing requires you to see where the crowd is wrong so that you can profit from their misperceptions.
• I’m trying to manage myself, not just my portfolio.
• To become a good investor, I would need to come to an acceptance of myself as an outsider.
• For most people, attaining the intellectual clarity and emotional detachment that investing requires is tough.
• The trend of the market is up, not down. Shorting stocks puts you against that trend and thus makes it more difficult to make money.
• I learned to see myself and my role as a capitalist. As somebody who’s trying to harness, for myself and for society, the power of greed and the power of the will to acquire into something that makes the world a better place. That’s the version of capitalism that we want.
• If we take responsibility for our mistakes and failures, they offer priceless opportunities to learn about ourselves and how we need to improve.
• Inaction and patience are almost always the wisest options for investors in the stock market.

Jack Bogle (The Father of Index Investing)

John Clifton Bogle was an American investor, business magnate, philanthropist, and founder and CEO of The Vanguard Group. He revolutionized the mutual fund world by creating index investing, which allows investors to buy mutual funds that track the broader market and makes investing more accessible and at a low cost for average investors.

Here are Jack Bogle’s top quotes and advice on investing: 

• In investing, you get what you don’t pay for. Costs matter. So intelligent investors will use low-cost index funds to build a diversified portfolio of stocks and bonds, and they will stay the course. And they won’t be foolish enough to think that they can consistently outsmart the market.
• Time is your friend; impulse is your enemy.
• The market is often stupid, but you can’t focus on that. Focus on the underlying value of dividends and earnings.
• The stock market is a giant distraction from the business of investing.
• Mutual funds with superior performance records often falter.
• Enjoy the magic of compounding returns. Even modest investments made in one’s early 20s are likely to grow to staggering amounts over the course of an investment lifetime.
• I’ve usually used the phrase ‘stay the course’ as one of the great rules of investment success.
• If you were to just design the perfect retirement plan, you would own the stock market, or you would own the bond market. You would get all the costs or all that you possibly could out of the system. So on an annual basis, if the market went up 8 percent, you would get 7.8 or 7.9 percent.
• Investing is a virtuous habit best started as early as possible.
• The grim irony of investing is that we investors as a group not only don’t get what we pay for, we get precisely what we don’t pay for.
• Wise investors won’t try to outsmart the market.
• Investing is not nearly as difficult as it looks. Successful investing involves doing a few things right and avoiding serious mistakes.

Jesse Livermore (The Bear of Wall Street)

Jesse Lauriston Livermore was an American stock trader who pioneered day trading. He garnered credit on Wall Street for predicting market drops, earning the nickname ‘the Bear of Wall Street,’ particularly in his legendary trades, such as taking short positions before the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and just before the 1929 Wall Street Crash.

Here are Jesse Livermore’s top quotes and advice on investing: 

• Nothing new ever occurs in the business of speculating or investing in securities and commodities.
• Don’t trust your own opinion and back your judgment until the action of the market itself confirms your opinion.
• Markets are never wrong – opinions often are.
• The real money made in speculating has been in commitments showing in profit right from the start.
• As long as a stock is acting right, and the market is right, do not be in a hurry to take profits.
• The money lost by speculation alone is small compared with the gigantic sums lost by so-called investors who have let their investments ride.
• Never buy a stock because it has had a big decline from its previous high.
• Never sell a stock because it seems high-priced.
• I become a buyer as soon as a stock makes a new high on its movement after having had a normal reaction.
• Never average losses.
• The human side of every person is the greatest enemy of the average investor or speculator.
• Do not become completely bearish or bullish on the whole market because one stock in some particular group has plainly reversed its course from the general trend.

Jim Simons (The Quant King and Greatest Investor on Wall Street)

James Harris Simons is a renowned American mathematician, billionaire hedge fund manager, philanthropist, and the founder of Renaissance Technologies. This New York-based quantitative hedge fund firm employs mathematical models and algorithms to make investment profits from market inefficiencies. He has also taught mathematics at MIT, Harvard University, and Stony Brook University.

Here are Jim Simon’s top quotes and advice on investing: 

• Past performance is the best predictor of success.
• The system is always leaking, and we keep having to add water to keep it ahead of the game.
• I wasn’t the fastest guy in the world. I wouldn’t have done well in an Olympiad or a math contest. But I like to ponder. And pondering things, just sort of thinking about it and thinking about it, turns out to be a pretty good approach.
• It’s supply and demand. If gold is discovered, then it gets harder to make money mining gold because everyone’s competing with you.
• There’s no such thing as the goose that lays the golden egg forever.
• The things we are doing will not go away. We may have bad years, we may have a terrible year sometimes. But the principles we’ve discovered are valid.
• Luck plays a meaningful role in everyone’s lives.
• Investing and speech recognition are very similar. In both, you’re trying to guess the next thing that happens.
• Patterns of price movement are not random. However, they’re close enough to random so that getting some excess, some edge out of it, is not easy and not so obvious — thank God. God probably doesn’t care. Thank whoever.
• Efficient market theory is correct in that there are no gross inefficiencies, but we look at anomalies that may be small in size and brief in time.
• Certain price patterns are nonrandom and will lead to a predictive effect.
• Models can lower your risk. It reduces the daily aggravation.

Jim Slater (The Master)

James Derrick Slater was a British accountant, investor, business writer, and the founding chairman of Slater Walker, a property, banking, and investment group that collapsed during the banking crisis in the 1970s. His legendary statement, ‘elephants don’t gallop,’ runs very popular in investing and illustrates that big companies rarely double in size, but small ones can.

Here are Jim Slater’s top quotes and advice on investing: 

• Elephants don’t gallop.
• Most leading brokers cannot spare the time and money to research smaller stocks. You are, therefore, more likely to find a bargain in this relatively under-exploited area of the stock market.
• Investment is essentially the arbitrage of ignorance. The successful investor believes he knows something that other investors do not fully appreciate. There is very little that is unknown about leading stocks. In contrast, most leading brokers cannot spare the time and money to research smaller stocks. You are, therefore, more likely to find a bargain (with some ignorance to arbitrage) in this relatively under-exploited area of the stock market.
• I have always been attracted to growth shares, particularly those that can be purchased at what I perceive to be a discount to their proper value.

Joel Greenblatt (The ‘Magic Formula’ Creator)

Joel Greenblatt is an American academic, hedge fund manager, value investor, philanthropist, and writer who runs Gotham Asset Management with his partner, Robert Goldstein. His famed magic formula for outperforming the market is based on long-term confidence in finding companies with low share prices but high returns on earnings and invested capital.

Here are Joel Greenblatt’s top quotes and advice on investing: 

• When it comes to long-term investing, doing ‘less’ is often ‘more.’
• We want to get more earnings for the price we’re paying.
• The market’s very emotional, but over time, doing something logical and systematic does work. The market eventually gets it right.
• The secret to successful investing is relatively simple: Figure out the value of something and then pay a lot less.
• Choosing individual stocks without any idea of what you’re looking for is like running through a dynamite factory with a burning match. You may live, but you’re still an idiot.
• The strategy of putting all your eggs in one basket and watching that basket is less risky than you might think.
• Stock prices move around wildly over very short periods of time. This does not mean that the values of the underlying companies have changed very much during that same period. In effect, the stock market acts very much like a crazy guy named Mr. Market.
• Remember, it’s the quality of your ideas, not the quantity, that will result in the big money.
• The more confidence I have in each one of my stock picks, the fewer companies I need to own in my portfolio to feel comfortable.
• Look down, not up, when making your initial investment decision. If you don’t lose money, most of the remaining alternatives are good ones.
• Value investing doesn’t always work. The market doesn’t always agree with you. Over time, value is roughly the way the market prices stocks, but over the short term, which sometimes can be as long as two or three years, there are periods when it doesn’t work. And that is a very good thing.
• Here is part of the tradeoff with diversification. You must be diversified enough to survive bad times or bad luck so that skill and good process can have the chance to pay off over the long term.

John Neff (The Contrarian and Value Investor)

John Neff was an American investor, mutual fund manager, and philanthropist. As a legendary contrarian and value investor, he would go against the popular investment strategies and buy stocks at sale prices in low-profile, undervalued companies with a good price-to-earnings ratio.

Here are John Neff’s top quotes and advice on investing: 

• It’s not always easy to do what’s not popular, but that’s where you make your money. Buy stocks that look bad to less careful investors and hang on until their real value is recognized.
• Successful stocks don’t tell you when to sell. When you feel like bragging, it’s probably time to sell.
• I don’t want a lot of good investments; I want a few outstanding ones.
• I’ve never bought a stock unless, in my view, it was on sale.
• Buy on the cannons and sell on the trumpets.
• A lot of people can’t bear to sell when a stock’s price is going up. They’re convinced that they’ve made a mistake if they don’t hold out for the last dollar.
• Inflection points occur in the market, and around them performance can suffer, but you have to stick to your guns.
• Obsession with broad diversification is the sure road to mediocrity.
• If you buy stocks when they are out of favor and unloved, and sell them into strength when other investors recognize their merits, you’ll often go home with handsome gains.
• My kind of investing rests on three elements: character, goals, and experience.
• The market has good days and bad days, good years and bad years. You can’t predict them, and they can reverse course with stunning speed. But you can learn to cope with them and improve your odds.
• I wouldn’t want to get caught in a rush for the exit, much less get left behind.

John Paulson (One of the Most Prominent Names in High Finance)

John Alfred Paulson is an American billionaire hedge fund manager, the president and portfolio manager of Paulson & Co. Inc., philanthropist, and is identified as ‘one of the most prominent names in high finance’ for making one of the most enormous fortunes in Wall Street history.

Here are John Paulson’s top quotes and advice on investing: 

• Stock market goes up or down, and you can’t adjust your portfolio based on the whims of the market, so you have to have a strategy in a position and stay true to that strategy and not pay attention to noise that could surround any particular investment.
• I still think buying a home is the best investment any individual can make.
• If you are looking for a hedge for potential inflation for the future and have a longer term view, then gold is still a good bet.
• Well, the most important thing in investing is to know what you’re investing in, and if you’re confident in the outcome, it’s important to stay true to your position.
• In these times of uncertainty for paper-based currency, I feel more secure in holding gold.
• The financial crisis was linked to the fact that banks had excessive leverage and too many risky assets. The solution is not to try to dictate to banks what they can do or not do, but to require them to strengthen their capital to absorb potential losses and hold less risky assets.
• The important thing in investing is to be true to your compass.
• Don’t focus on weekly or monthly returns.
• Many investors make the mistake of buying high and selling low while the exact opposite is the right strategy.
• Fear-driven periods in the past have been used as buying opportunities for savvy investors.
• If you rent, the rent goes up every year. But if you buy a 30-year mortgage, the cost is fixed.
• Our goal is not to outperform all the time – that’s not possible. We want to outperform over time.

John Templeton (The Contrarian Investor)

John Marks Templeton was an American-born British legendary investor, banker, mutual-fund manager, and philanthropist. His contrarian investment strategy was characterized by trading stocks in contrast to the prevailing sentiment of the time. One of the first investors to focus on global markets, he amassed a fortune and gave away millions of dollars to foster an understanding of what he called ‘spiritual realities.’

Here are John Templeton’s top quotes and advice on investing: 

• The four most expensive word in the English language are ‘This time it’s different.
• If you want to become really wealthy, you must have your money work for you.
• The best time to invest is when you have money.
• The influence on stock prices is so numerous and so complex that no person has ever been able to predict the trend of stock prices with consistent success.
• When people are desperately trying to sell, I buy. When people are desperately trying to buy, I sell. It has worked out very well over the years.
• Diversification is a safety factor that is essential because we should be humble enough to admit we can be wrong.
• See the investment world as an ocean and buy where you get the most value for your money.
• I never in all my life bought a stock because I liked it. I bought it because it was a cheaper bargain than any similar stock I would buy anywhere in the rest of the world.
• Through reluctance to sell, more than one investor has avoided the capital gains tax but lost the capital gain itself.
• A lifetime of investment research has taught me to become more and more humble about making predictions.
• The difficulty of determining what any stock is really worth is very great indeed. No two security analysts will agree on the worth of a stock or even on the definition of the word.
• The time of maximum pessimism is the best time to buy, and the time of maximum optimism is the best time to sell.

Michael Steinhardt (The Modern Hedge Fund Pioneer)

Michael Steinhardt is an American billionaire hedge fund manager, philanthropist, and antiquities collector who pioneered modern hedge funds as he founded Steinhardt Partners in the 1960s. He closed his fund in 1995 after making a fortune in the 1990s from stellar returns.

Here are Michael Steinhardt’s top quotes and advice on investing: 

• A good trader has to have three things: a chronic inability to accept things at face value, to feel continuously unsettled, and to have humility.
• Always trust your intuition, which resembles a hidden supercomputer in the mind. It can help you do the right thing at the right time if you give it a chance.
• Good investing is a peculiar balance between the conviction to follow your ideas and the flexibility to recognize when you have made a mistake.
• Anyone who thinks he can formulate a success in this market is deluding himself because it changes too quickly.
• Do not make small investments. If you are going to put money at risk, make sure the reward is high enough to justify the time and effort you put into the investment decision.
• I always used fundamentals. Nevertheless, the fact is that often, the period of my investments was short-term.
• I do an enormous amount of trading, not necessarily just for profit but also because it opens up other opportunities. I get a chance to smell many things. Trading is a catalyst.
• The markets are always changing, and the successful trader needs to adapt to these changes.
• You have to be intellectually honest with yourself and others. In my judgment, all great investors are seekers of truth.
• Time and again, in every market cycle I have witnessed, the extremes of emotion always appear, even among experienced investors. When the world wants to buy only bonds, you can almost close your eyes and buy stocks.
• When your views are truly contrarian, they are inevitably uncomfortable. Courage and the ability to withstand pain are required.

Peter Lynch (The Value Investor and ‘Invest in What You Know’ Advocate)

Peter Lynch is an American investor, mutual fund manager, and philanthropist famous for managing Magellan Fund and Fidelity Investments. He is credited for popularizing the phrase ‘invest in what you know,’ which he uses to describe his investment strategy in a belief that investors should invest in companies they are familiar with and understand rather than simply predicting the stock market movements.

Here are Peter Lynch’s top quotes and advice on investing: 

• The real key to making money in stocks is not to get scared out of them.
• You get recessions; you have stock market declines. If you don’t understand that’s going to happen, then you’re not ready; you won’t do well in the markets.
• The person that turns over the most rocks wins the game. And that’s always been my philosophy.
• Although it’s easy to forget sometimes, a share is not a lottery ticket… it’s part-ownership of a business.
• Everyone has the brainpower to follow the stock market. If you made it through fifth-grade math, you can do it.
• I’ve found that when the market’s going down and you buy funds wisely, at some point in the future you will be happy. You won’t get there by reading ‘Now is the time to buy.’
• I’ve found that when the market’s going down and you buy funds wisely, at some point in the future, you will be happy.
• The trick is not to learn to trust your gut feelings but rather to discipline yourself to ignore them. Stand by your stocks as long as the fundamental story of the company hasn’t changed.
• Know what you own, and know why you own it.
• People who succeed in the stock market also accept periodic losses, setbacks, and unexpected occurrences. Calamitous drops do not scare them out of the game.
• When you sell in desperation, you always sell cheap.
• Look for small companies that are already profitable and have proven that their concept can be replicated. Be suspicious of companies with growth rates of 50 to 100 percent a year.

Philip Fisher (The Growth Investing Pioneer)

Philip Arthur Fisher was a renowned American stock investor, investment strategist, author of Common Stocks and Uncommon Profits, and founder of Fisher & Co., an investment firm. He was also widely known for his buy-and-hold approach to investing. At the same time, his principles identified long-term growth stocks and their emerging value as primarily based on fundamental analyses.

Here are Philip Fisher’s top quotes and advice on investing: 

• When profit margins of a whole industry rise because of repeated price increases, the indication is not a good one for the long-range investor.
• The only true test of whether a stock is cheap or high is not its current price in relation to some former price, no matter how accustomed we may have become to that former price, but whether the company’s fundamentals are significantly more or less favorable than the current financial-community appraisal of that stock.
• The successful investor is usually an individual who is inherently interested in business problems.
• The stock market is filled with individuals who know the price of everything, but the value of nothing.
• It’s my job to find unusual companies and then judge whether the price they’re selling at is too high.
• If you are in the right companies, the potential rise can be so enormous that everything else is secondary.
• Even a great company can be priced too high if there’s a lot of glamour attached to it.
• The big profits I have made were through very long planning, waiting and watching.
• Buy slowly stocks of companies that will capitalize on the problems of scarcity and social need. Companies with excellent management.
• I don’t want to spend my time trying to earn a lot of little profits. I want very, very big profits that I’m ready to wait for.
• I know plenty of guys who consider themselves to be long-term investors but who are still perfectly happy to trade in and out and back into their favorite stocks.
• I think a weakness of many people’s approach to investment is that they try to be jacks of all trades and masters of none.

Prince Al Waleed Bin Talal (Arabian Warren Buffett)

Prince Al Waleed bin Talal Al Saud is a Saudi Arabian billionaire, businessman, investor, philanthropist, and member of the Royal House of Saud. He owns chunks of private and public companies in the United States, Europe, and the Middle East through Kingdom Holdings Company, a holding firm he founded and in which he owns 95% of shares. 

Here are Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal’s top quotes and advice on investing: 

• If I’m going to do something, I do it spectacularly or I don’t do it at all.
• My wheels are running. My investments are local, regional and international.
• We’re getting hurt, but I’m a long-term investor.
• So, if you look at what’s common among some of the companies I have, including the Four Seasons, NewsCorp, George V, the Plaza, these are all irreplaceable brands in their own fields.

Rakesh Jhunjhunwala (India’s Warren Buffett)

Rakesh Jhunjhunwala was an Indian billionaire, business magnate, chartered accountant, stock trader, investor, and partner of his asset management firm, Rare Enterprises. One of the greatest stock market investors India has ever seen, he favored stocks in the finance, tech, retail, and pharmaceutical sectors.

Here are Rakesh Jhunjhunwala’s top quotes and advice on investing: 

• The markets are like a weather; you may not like it but you have to bear it.
• I am not afraid of making mistakes. But my mistakes were those that I could afford. That’s very important: mistakes will happen, but you must ensure that you keep them within limits you can afford.
• You know, a balance sheet is like a bikini, it shows more, but it hides what is vital. I learnt to read a balance sheet, and then I got fascinated by stocks.
• Emotional investment is a sure way to make loss in stock markets.
• You can’t make money on borrowed knowledge. If following Rakesh Jhunjhunwala was all it took to make money, a lot more people would be rich. It requires patience, and you learn from mistakes.
• See, I’m a risk taker. If I feel very opinionated, I can really put the money on the table.
• Markets may in the short-term correct. But in a bull market, the correction is always sharp, swift, and short-lived.
• I am buying the most unpopular, most battered stocks, but then who knows?
• Insurance, pension reforms are going to be extremely important for the stock market because the kind of money we’ll get from that is unbelievable.
• Markets go up not because there is abundance of buyers, but because there is a lack of sellers.
• Respect the market. Have an open mind. Know what to stake. Know when to take a loss. Be responsible.
• Hastily taken decisions always result in heavy losses. Take your own time before putting money in any stock.

Ray Dalio (The Steve Jobs of Investing)

Raymond Thomas Dalio is an American billionaire investor and hedge fund manager who has served as co-chief investment officer of Bridgewater Associates, the world’s largest hedge fund firm he founded in 1975. He believes his success results from principles he has learned, codified, and applied to his life and business. 

Here are Ray Dalio’s top quotes and advice on investing: 

• There are two main drivers of asset class returns – inflation and growth.
• I think that the first thing is you should have a strategic asset allocation mix that assumes that you don’t know what the future is going to hold.
• It all comes down to interest rates. As an investor, all you’re doing is putting up a lump-sum payment for a future cash flow.
• When growth is slower than expected, stocks go down. When inflation is higher-than-expected, bonds go down. When inflation is lower-than-expected, bonds go up.
• Not being controlled by an emotion helps to see things at a higher level.
• The biggest mistake in investing is believing the last three years is representative of what the next three years is going to be like.
• Pain + Reflection = Progress.
• Reality + Dreams + Determination = A Successful Life.
• In order to make money in the market you have to be an independent thinker. And I think also creative, you have to be willing to make mistakes.
• We are a unique group of good investors doing unique things.
• In the markets, you can do a huge amount of work and still be wrong.
• Bad opinions can be very costly.

Sallie Krawcheck (The Most Powerful Woman on Wall Street)

Sallie Krawkcheck is the former head of Bank of America’s Global Wealth and Investment Management division, a former Wall Street executive, and the co-founder and CEO of Ellevest, a digital financial advisor for women with a working goal of closing the gender investing gap in the United States by redefining investing for women.

Here are Sallie Krawcheck’s top quotes and advice on investing: 

• We shouldn’t think anyone needs a Ph.D. in advanced investing in order to begin to invest.
• The research indicates that when we women invest, we women do tend to be more patient, take a longer-term perspective, and as a result of it, tend to be better investors than men. But the messages we get are that investing is sort of ‘the guys’ world.’
• People just haven’t saved enough for retirement. And they’re going to outlive their money.
• Women aren’t driven by or thrilled by outperforming the market. They’re much more excited about, ‘Can I meet my goal?’
• Investing isn’t a game to be won. At the end of the day, it’s a way to achieve your big goals, like buying that home, starting that business, and retiring on your own terms.
• Albert Einstein is reported to have said compounding is the eighth wonder of the world. Obviously, a dollar invested in your 20s is worth so much more than a dollar invested in your 60s.
• I would say one of the reasons that women don’t invest to the same extent that men do, is because we still think of it in some ways as a male pursuit.
• I think that indicates why men tend to invest more wealth. If he loses some, there’s more coming in. Whereas for women, it’s like “Ugh, I gotta keep this.”
• There is absolutely nothing that beats hard work.
• Follow the money at all costs, and you might wind up regretting it.
• Most financial questions don’t have one right answer, just an answer that’s right for you.
• Whatever your income level is, save as much as you can—up to 20%, but more if you can—and invest it. Put that into an IRA; put that into a brokerage account.

Suleyman Kerimov (The Russian Gatsby)

Suleyman Abusaidovich Kerimov is a Russia-based billionaire investor, economist, oligarch, and politician. As an economist, he has made a career investing billions in distressed assets in Russia, as well as in Western financial systems and global banks such as Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, and Deutsche Bank. 

Here are Suleyman Kerimov’s top quotes and advice on investing: 

• The main thing during a crisis is discipline, to begin investing in time again after the crisis subsides.
• We don’t manage money for anyone else. We bear responsibility only for our own risks.
• Business is not the aim of life; it’s a game.

T. Rowe Price (The Father of Growth Investing)

Thomas Rowe Price Jr. founded a Baltimore-based investment company that manages over one trillion dollars and services clients globally. He believed investors could amass great investment returns by investing in well-managed companies in fertile, promising industries.

Here are T. Rowe Price’s top quotes and advice on investing: 

• When picking a list of growth stocks for long-term investment, broad diversification of the risk is the first and most important principle to follow. No one can look ahead five or ten years and say what is the most promising industry or the best stock to own.
• Investors should seek a company that can lower the cost of production and develop an expanding market without materially reducing the return on capital invested in the business.
• Growth stocks are as varied in their characteristics as a surgeon’s instruments or a carpenter’s tools, and, similarly, successful results are dependent on knowledge and experience in their proper use.
• While the trend in profit margins is one of the most important factors to consider, it is not always the company which reports the higher profit margin that proves to be the better growth stock.
• No mathematical formula or yardstick alone can be relied on for identifying growth stocks or for detecting when their earnings reach maturity.
• The two best ways of measuring the life cycle of an industry are unit volume of sales and net earnings available for stockholders.
• There are two sound reasons for investing in common stocks — growth of income and growth of principal.
• In planning an investment program, it is extremely important that the investor, before purchasing any securities, should ask himself, “What is my objective?”
• A ton of regret never makes an ounce of difference.
• Change is the investor’s only certainty.
• The growth stock theory of investing requires patience but is less stressful than trading, generally has less risk, and reduces brokerage commissions and income taxes.
• If you stay half-alert, you can pick the spectacular performers right from your place of business or out of the neighborhood shopping mall, and long before Wall Street discovers them.

Warren Buffett (The Oracle of Omaha)

Warren Edward Buffett is perhaps the most successful investor of the 20th century or throughout history. He is an American business magnate, investor, philanthropist, and the CEO of Berkshire Hathaway, a multinational conglomerate holding company with interests in insurance, equities, and securities.

Here are Warren Buffett’s top quotes and advice on investing: 

• The first rule of an investment is don’t lose (money). And the second rule of an investment is don’t forget the first rule. And that’s all the rules there are.
• I will tell you how to become rich. Close the doors. Be fearful when others are greedy. Be greedy when others are fearful.
• Wide diversification is only required when investors do not understand what they are doing.
• I don’t look to jump over seven-foot bars; I look around for one-foot bars that I can step over.
• Someone’s sitting in the shade today because someone planted a tree a long time ago.
• Price is what you pay. Value is what you get.
• It’s far better to buy a wonderful company at a fair price than a fair company at a wonderful price.
• Beware the investment activity that produces applause; the great moves are usually greeted by yawns.
• Never invest in a business you cannot understand.
• Never depend on a single income. Make an investment to create a second source.
• The stock market is a device to transfer money from the impatient to the patient.
• Diversification is protection against ignorance. It makes little sense if you know what you are doing.

References: A-Z Quotes, Brainy Quote, Goodreads, Gracious Quotes, Investopaper, Investopedia,  Live Mint, Novel Investor, QuoteFancy, and Quoteswise.

Read also:

Filipinos’ Financial Literacy: What Numbers Say and Why It Matters. This comprehensive article examines the low financial literacy level among Filipinos, as well as the common barriers such as insufficient school integration, economic inequality and poverty, and disinterest and faulty mindsets.

10 Investment Options for Young Professionals. This short article recommends 10 good investments to young working professionals in the Philippines or anywhere else which include education and professional growth, financial literacy, real estate, and retirement funds, among others.