When it comes to compressing as much information in as few lines as possible, quotes stand second to none. These can sometimes be funny, sometimes insightful, and in some cases, both.

The importance of stock markets in the recent history of humankind cannot be understated, and as such, there’s a vast repertoire of great thinkers that devoted their lives to the stock market. In addition to having become billionaires, they have also amassed their own stash of quotes.

In this article, I will share the quotes that have impacted me the most. To not make this text infinitely long, I only added my favorite ones. In addition to their text-based version, I also created an image version for most of them to make them more shareable on social media.

Quotes about statistics in financial markets

“Many investment managers believe that the secret to riches is to implement an extremely complex ML algorithm. They are setting themselves up for disappointment. If it was as easy as coding a state-of-the-art classifier, most people in Silicon Valley would be billionaires.”

Marcos Lopez de Prado
Advances in Financial Machine Learning

“We’re right 50.75 percent of the time . . . but we’re 100 percent right 50.75 percent of the time. You can make billions that way.”

Robert Mercer

“There are a million ways to make money in the markets. The irony is that they are all very difficult to find.”

Jack D. Schwager

“Lesson: Do not assume that what investors call momentum, a long streak of either rising or falling prices, will continue unless you can make a sound case that it will.”

Edward O. Thorp

“The stock investor is neither right or wrong because others agreed or disagreed with him; he is right because his facts and analysis are right.”

Benjamin Graham

“It’s not whether you’re right or wrong, but how much money you make when you’re right and how much you lose when you’re wrong.”

George Soros

“I have always believed that a single talented analyst, working very hard, can cover an amazing amount of investment landscape, and this belief remains unchallenged in my mind.”

Michael Burry

Quotes about how markets work

“The fact that a thesis is flawed does not mean that we should not invest in it as long as other people believe in it and there is a large group of people left to be convinced. The point was made by John Maynard Keynes when he compared the stock market to a beauty contest where the winner is not the most beautiful contestant but the one whom the greatest number of people consider beautiful. Where I have something significant to add is in pointing out that it pays to look for the flaws; if we find them, we are ahead of the game because we can limit our losses when the market also discovers what we already know. It is when we are unaware of what could go wrong that we have to worry.”

George Soros

“There is a powerful case for the market mechanism, but it is not that markets are perfect; it is that in a world dominated by imperfect understanding, markets provide an efficient feedback mechanism for evaluating the results of one’s decisions and correcting mistakes.”

George Soros

“Tolstoy opens Anna Karenina by observing: “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” Business is the opposite. All happy companies are different: each one earns a monopoly by solving a unique problem. All failed companies are the same: they failed to escape competition.”

Peter Thiel

“Markets are constantly in a state of uncertainty and flux and money is made by discounting the obvious and betting on the unexpected.”

George Soros

“Economic theory is devoted to the study of equilibrium positions. The concept of equilibrium is very useful. It allows us to focus on the final outcome rather than the process that leads up to it. But the concept is also very deceptive. It has the aura of something empirical: since the adjustment process is supposed to lead to an equilibrium, an equilibrium position seems somehow implicit in our observations. That is not true. Equilibrium itself has rarely been observed in real life — market prices have a notorious habit of fluctuating.”

George Soros

“I learned from my losing silver investment that when the interests of the salesmen and promoters differ from those of the client, the client had better look out for himself. This is the well-known agency problem in economics, where the interest of the agents or managers don’t coincide with those of the principals, or owners. Shareholders of companies that have been pillaged by self-serving CEOs and boards of directors are painfully familiar with this.”

Edward O. Thorp

Quotes about value investing

“A stock is not just a ticker symbol or an electronic blip; it is an ownership interest in an actual business, with an underlying value that does not depend on its share price.”

Benjamin Graham

“In the short run, the market is a voting machine but in the long run, it is a weighing machine.”

Benjamin Graham

“The value of a company has very little to do with its stock price.”

Hendrith Vanlon

Quotes about trading psychology

“The prevailing wisdom is that markets are always right. I take the opposition position. I assume that markets are always wrong. Even if my assumption is occasionally wrong, I use it as a working hypothesis. It does not follow that one should always go against the prevailing trend. On the contrary, most of the time the trend prevails; only occasionally are the errors corrected. It is only on those occasions that one should go against the trend. This line of reasoning leads me to look for the flaw in every investment thesis. … I am ahead of the curve. I watch out for telltale signs that a trend may be exhausted. Then I disengage from the herd and look for a different investment thesis. Or, if I think the trend has been carried to excess, I may probe going against it. Most of the time we are punished if we go against the trend. Only at an inflection point are we rewarded.”

George Soros

“The trick is not to learn to trust your gut feelings, but rather to discipline yourself to ignore them. Stand by your stocks as long as the fundamental story of the company hasn’t changed.”

Peter Lynch

“Be fearful when others are greedy and greedy when others are fearful.”

Edward O. Thorp

“People want an authority to tell them how to value things, but they choose this authority not based on facts or results.”

Michael Burry

“One of the funny things about the stock market is that every time one person buys, another sells, and both think they are astute.”

William Feather

“The intelligent investor is a realist who sells to optimists and buys from pessimists.”

Benjamin Graham

“When you combine ignorance and leverage, you get some pretty interesting results.”

Warren Buffett

Other interesting stock market quotes

“The pleasure of rooting for Goliath is that you can expect to win. The pleasure of rooting for David is that, while you don’t know what to expect, you stand at least a chance of being inspired.”

Michael Lewis

“There is nothing like losing all you have in the world for teaching you what not to do. And when you know what not to do in order not to lose money, you begin to learn what to do in order to win. Did you get that? You begin to learn!”

Edwin Lefèvre