Limited Time Offer
Premium members can get their quote collection automatically imported into their Quotewise collections.
Fraud aside, we should have known better. We should have known that investments in transforming technologies have often proved unrewarding for invest… - Burton Malkiel
" "Fraud aside, we should have known better. We should have known that investments in transforming technologies have often proved unrewarding for investors. In the 1850s, the railroad was widely expected to greatly increase the efficiency of communications and commerce. It certainly did so, but it did not justify the prices of railroad stocks, which rose to enormous speculative heights before collapsing in August 1857. A century later, airlines and television manufacturers transformed our country, but most of the early investors lost their shirts. The key to investing is not how much an industry will affect society or even how much it will grow, but rather its ability to make and sustain profits. And history tells us that eventually all excessively exuberant markets succumb to the laws of gravity. The consistent losers in the market, from my personal experience, are those who are unable to resist being swept up in some kind of tulip-bulb craze. It is not hard, really, to make money in the market. As we shall see later, an investor who simply buys and holds a broad-based portfolio of stocks can make reasonably generous long-run returns. What is hard to avoid is the alluring temptation to throw your money away on short, get-rich-quick speculative binges.
English
Collect this quote
About Burton Malkiel
Burton Gordon Malkiel (born August 28, 1932) is an American economist and writer, most famous for his classic finance book A Random Walk Down Wall Street.
Also Known As
Alternative Names:
Burton Gordon Malkiel
•
Burton G. Malkiel
Related quotes. More quotes will automatically load as you scroll down, or you can use the load more buttons.
Additional quotes by Burton Malkiel
The efficient-market hypothesis does not imply, as some critics have proclaimed, that stock prices are always correct. In fact, stock prices are always wrong. What EMH implies is that no one knows for sure if stock prices are too high or too low. Nor does EMH state that stock prices move aimlessly and erratically and are insensitive to changes in fundamental information. On the contrary, the reason prices move randomly is just the opposite. The market is so efficient—prices move so quickly when information arises—that no one can buy or sell fast enough to benefit. And real news develops randomly, that is, unpredictably. It cannot be predicted by studying either past technical or fundamental information.
Technology will ultimately greatly improve the intentional payments system. And there will always be advantages to holding an asset that is anonymous and transportable without a physical trace. But the lessons of history are immutable. Speculative bubbles will persist. But they ultimately lead most of their participants to financial ruin. Even real technology revolutions do not guarantee benefits for investors.
History, in this instance, does teach a lesson: Although the castle-in-the-air theory can well explain such speculative binges, outguessing the reactions of a fickle crowd is a most dangerous game. “In crowds it is stupidity and not mother-wit that is accumulated,” Gustave Le Bon noted in his 1895 classic on crowd psychology. It would appear that not many have read the book. Skyrocketing markets that depend on purely psychic support have invariably succumbed to the financial law of gravitation. Unsustainable prices may persist for years, but eventually they reverse themselves. Such reversals come with the suddenness of an earthquake; and the bigger the binge, the greater the resulting hangover. Few of the reckless builders of castles in the air have been nimble enough to anticipate these reversals and to escape when everything came tumbling down.
Loading...