One of the very nice things about investing in the stock market is that you learn about all different aspects of the economy. It's your window into a very large world.
Mutual funds have historically offered safety and diversification. And they spare you the responsibility of picking individual stocks.
Unless you devote an enormous amount of time to anticipating the future, you won't have any future.
Stock market corrections, although painful at the time, are actually a very healthy part of the whole mechanism, because there are always speculative excesses that develop, particularly during the long bull market.
You don't want too much fear in a market, because people will be blinded to some very good buying opportunities. You don't want too much complacency because people will be blinded to some risk.
After 1929, so many people had been traumatized by the stock market crash that there was a lost generation.
Any bull market covers a multitude of sins, so there may be all sorts of problems with the current system that we won't see until the bear market comes.
As a bull market continues, almost anything you buy goes up. It makes you feel that investing in stocks is a very easy and safe and that you're a financial genius.
The founding fathers were not only brilliant, they were system builders and systematic thinkers. They came up with comprehensive plans and visions.
Washington once advised his adopted grandson that where there is no occasion for expressing an opinion, it is best to be silent. For there is nothing more certain than that it is at all times more easy to make enemies than friends.
Early on, New York already had a national and even international identity.
Mutual fund managers are trapped in this rather deadly vicious circle: the more successful they are, the more money flows into their mutual fund. Then, it is more difficult for them to beat the market averages or even to match their own past performance.
I'm a biographer; I can live with a little hyperbole.
A prudent silence will frequently be taken for wisdom and a sentence or two cautiously thrown in will sometimes gain the palm of knowledge, while a man well informed but indiscreet and unreserved will not uncommonly talk himself out of all consideration and weight. (Alexander Hamilton's 'thesis on discretion' written to his son James shortly before his fatal duel with Burr.)
A romantic striving for an impossible ideal.
The richly cadenced prose is hypnotic, the research prodigious, the analysis acute, the mood spellbinding, and the cast of characters mythic in scale. I cannot conceive of a better book about Capitol Hill. An unforgettable, epic achievement in the art of biography.
The securities laws of the 1930s were so important because it forced companies to file registration statements and issue prospectuses, and it remedied the imbalance of information.
I have developed a very strong partiality for the dead: they don't talk back, they don't sue, and they don't have angry relatives.
As the bull market goes on, people who take great risks achieve great rewards, seemingly without punishment. It's like crime without punishment or sex without sin.
We really haven't had very much experience with people funding their retirement out of the stock market, and we don't know, frankly, how it would work under every scenario.
The best argument for mutual funds is that they offer safety and diversification. But they don't necessarily offer safety and diversification.
That strategy of buy and hold, which is the sound and sensible one for the individual, can have very dangerous and perverse effects for the market as a whole.
Because of the love affair between the American public and the stock market, it is possible for entrepreneurs, technological visionaries and inventors of every sort to get financing.
Mutual funds give people the sense that they're investing with the big boys and that they're really not at a disadvantage entering the stock market.
Hamilton had one of those extraordinary 18th-century minds that touched on virtually every major topic of the day.
