William J. Bernstein Quotes

Investment planning and execution are two completely different animals.

The brokerage and mutual fund business form a financial colossus that bestrides modern financial, and increasingly, social and political life.

when a famous investor publishes a newsletter, it's a sure tip-off that his techniques have stopped working.

The Gordon Equation is as close as being a physical law, like gravitation or planetary motion, as we will ever encounter in finance.

The rub here is that buying when prices are low is always a very scary proposition. The low prices that produce high future returns are not possible without catastrophe and risk.

Human beings are not very good at taking losses or admitting failure.

Wealthy investors should realize that they are the cash cows of the investment industry, and that most of the exclusive investment vehicles available to them - separate accounts, hedge funds, limited partnerships, and the like - are designed to bleed them with commissions, transactional costs, and other fees.

In fact, using entirely reasonable assumptions, you can make the Dow's discounted market value almost anything you want it to be.

Value stock returns are impossible to estimate using the traditional methods, because most of the excessive return arises from the slow improvement in valuations that occurs as doggy stocks become less doggy over time.

When the barbarians are at the gates, interest rates rise and bond prices fall precipitously.

The wealthy are different than you and I: they have many more ways of having their wealth stripped away.

If markets were truly efficient, then you shouldn't be able to make any money rebalancing.

We tend to think of the stock and bond markets as relatively recent historical phenomena, but, in fact, there have been credit markets since human civilization first took root in the Fertile Crescent.

It is often said that a monkey could run an index fund. Nothing could be further fro the truth. Precisely tracking an index requires a very high degree of market savvy, discipline and nerve.

The advent of modern communication technology has simply facilitated the rapid dissemination of increasingly trivial information.