William J. Bernstein Quotes

Investment planning and execution are two completely different animals.

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.

Journalism attracts people with exceptional linguistic talent, but I have found that very few have the mathematical sophistication to appreciate the difference between skill and luck.

Most great financial innovators come from humble circumstances - nothing arouses fascination with financial assets quite like their absence.

Ninety-nine percent of what you read about investing in magazines and newspapers, and 100% of what you hear on television is worse than useless.

It is one thing to coolly design a portfolio strategy on a sheet of paper or computer monitor, and quite another to actually deploy it.

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

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

In finance as in life, there is often a huge chasm between what is expected and what actually transpires.

Investing is not a destination. It is an ongoing journey through its four continents - theory, history, psychology and business.

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.

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.

In fact, the nation's biggest investment pools are the retirement funds of the large corporations and governmental bodies, such as the California Public Employees Retirement System (CALPERS), which manages an astounding $170 billion. These plans receive a level of professional management that even the nations wealthiest investors can only dream of.

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

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.