William J. Bernstein Quotes

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

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

Investment planning and execution are two completely different animals.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

And lest I offend art lovers, it should be pointed out that even an old master, bought from the the artist for $100 and sold 350 years later for $10,000,000, has returned only 3.34% per year.

We tend to think of technological progress as an ever accelerating affair, but it just isn't so.

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

The real reason that physicians are rotten investors is that it never occurs to them that finance is a science, just like medicine.