Wall Street Sayings, Investing Quotes, Wisdom
This collection of Wall Street sayings represents thoughtful insights and practical wisdom you can use as an individual investor. The ideas expressed by professional investors and pundits will help provide you with a fundamental understanding of how to navigate the financial markets.
The best Wall Street sayings
Let’s start with the ten most famous sayings about stocks and investing. You’ll recognize most of these adages if you’ve spent any time watching investment television networks like CNBC, Bloomberg, and FOX Business.
Top 10 famous Wall Street quotes
1.) Buy low, sell high.
– Unknown
2.) It takes money to make money.
– Unknown
3.) It’s a market of stocks, not a stock market.
– Unknown
4.) Bull markets climb a wall of worry; bear markets slide down a river of hope.
– Unknown
5.) In the short run, the market is a voting machine but in the long run, it is a weighing machine.
– Benjamin Graham
6.) The time to buy is when there’s blood in the streets.
– Baron Rothschild
7.) There is always free cheese in a mousetrap.
– Unknown
8.) Bulls make money, bears make money, pigs (or hogs) get slaughtered.
– Unknown (used famously by CNBC’s Jim Cramer on Mad Money)
9.) Be fearful when others are greedy. Be greedy when others are fearful.
– Warren Buffett
10.) The four most dangerous words in investing are, it’s different this time.
– Sir John Templeton
More Wall Street sayings & adages
11.) The trend is your friend.
– Unknown
12.) An investment in knowledge pays the best interest.
– Benjamin Franklin
13.) What the wise man does in the beginning, the fool does in the end.
– Old Proverb
14.) The time of maximum pessimism is the best time to buy, and the time of maximum optimism is the best time to sell.
– Sir John Templeton
15.) In bear markets, stocks return to their rightful owners.
– Old Proverb
16.) The stock market will always do whatever makes the greatest number of people look foolish.
– Unknown
17.) It’s difficult to make predictions, especially with regards to the future.
– Old Proverb
Wise stock market sayings
18.) Those who know don’t tell, and those who tell don’t know.
– Michael Lewis
19.) In investing, what is comfortable is rarely profitable.
– Robert Arnott
20.) Fear incites human action far more urgently than does the impressive weight of historical evidence.
– Jeremy Siegel
21.) Wall Street sells stocks and bonds, but what it really peddles is hope.
– Jason Zweig
22.) The stock market is never obvious. It is designed to fool most of the people, most of the time.
– Jesse Livermore
23.) Risk cannot be eliminated; it just gets transferred and spread.
– Howard Marks
24.) It’s not how much money you make, but how much money you keep, how hard it works for you, and how many generations you keep it for.
– Robert Kiyosaki
25.) Remember that stocks are never too high for you to begin buying or too low to begin selling.
– Jesse Livermore
26.) People who think they know what is going to happen next are fools. Surprises — or what the brilliant author Nassim Taleb calls ‘Black Swans’ — are inevitable. Some are likely to be desperately unpleasant too.
– Martin Wolf
27.) Financial peace isn’t the acquisition of stuff. It’s learning to live on less than you make, so you can give money back and have money to invest. You can’t win until you do this.
– Dave Ramsey
28.) In a society governed passively by free markets and free elections, organized greed always defeats disorganized democracy.
– Matt Taibbi
Funny Wall Street sayings
29.) A stockbroker is a guy who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.
– Unknown
30.) October: This is one of the peculiarly dangerous months to speculate in stocks. The others are July, January, September, April, November, May, March, June, December, August and February.
– Mark Twain
31.) A bull market is like sex. It feels best just before it ends.
– Barton Biggs
32.) If you invest nothing, the reward is worth little.
– Richelle E. Goodrich
33.) Investing should be more like watching paint dry or watching grass grow. If you want excitement, take $800 and go to Las Vegas.
– Paul Samuelson
34.) Don’t look for the needle in the haystack. Just buy the haystack!
– John Bogle
35.) How many millionaires do you know who have become wealthy by investing in savings accounts? I rest my case.
– Robert G. Allen
36.) I put two children through Harvard by trading options. Unfortunately, they were my broker’s children.
– Jason Zweig
37.) The broker said the stock was “poised to move.” Silly me, I thought he meant up.
– Randy Thurman
38.) The most dangerous people in the world are very smart traders who have never gotten their teeth kicked in.
– F. Helmut Weymar
39.) If you don’t know who you are, this is an expensive place to find out.
– Adam Smith
40.) Millionaires don’t use Astrology, billionaires do.
– J.P. Morgan
41.) The main purpose of the stock market is to make fools of as many men as possible.
– Bernard Baruch
42.) I’d compare stock pickers to astrologers, but I don’t want to bad mouth astrologers.
– Eugene Fama
43.) If you want to be a millionaire, start with a billion dollars and launch a new airline.
– Richard Branson
44.) Markets can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent.
– John Maynard Keynes
Investing sayings
45.) Know what you own, and know why you own it.
– Peter Lynch
46.) I don’t care where stocks have been, I care where they’re going.
– Jim Cramer
47.) Given a 10% chance of a 100 times payoff, you should take that bet every time.
– Jeff Bezos
48.) Money is always eager and ready to work for anyone who is ready to employ it.
– Idowu Koyenikan
49.) The most contrarian thing of all is not to oppose the crowd but to think for yourself.
– Peter Thiel
50.) If you have trouble imagining a 20% loss in the stock market, you shouldn’t be in stocks.
– John Bogle
51.) When money realizes that it is in good hands, it wants to stay and multiply in those hands.
– Idowu Koyenikan
52.) Investing money is the process of committing resources in a strategic way to accomplish a specific objective.
– Alan Gotthardt
53.) Bottoms in the investment world don’t end with four-year lows; they end with 10- or 15-year lows.
– Jim Rogers
54.) Courage taught me no matter how bad a crisis gets … any sound investment will eventually pay off.
– Carlos Slim Helu
Check out these inspiring quotes about overcoming failure.
Investing wisdom from the pros
55.) Another lesson I learned early is that there is nothing new in Wall Street. There can’t be because speculation is as old as the hills. Whatever happens in the stock market today has happened before and will happen again.
– Jesse Livermore
56.) More people lost money waiting for corrections and anticipating corrections than the actual corrections.
– Peter Lynch
57.) It’s not whether you’re right or wrong that’s important, but how much money you make when you’re right and how much you lose when you’re wrong.
– George Soros
58.) It amazes me how people are often more willing to act based on little or no data than to use data that is a challenge to assemble.
– Robert Shiller
59.) If there is one common theme to the vast range of the world’s financial crises, it is that excessive debt accumulation, whether by the government, banks, corporations, or consumers, often poses greater systemic risks than it seems during a boom.
– Carmen Reinhart
60.) You get recessions, you have stock market declines. If you don’t understand that’s going to happen, then you’re not ready, you won’t do well in the markets.
– Peter Lynch
More Wall Street sayings
61.) Speculation is an effort, probably unsuccessful, to turn a little money into a lot. Investment is an effort, which should be successful, to prevent a lot of money from becoming a little.
– Fred Schwed Jr.
62.) Wealth isn’t primarily determined by investment performance, but by investor behavior.
– Nick Murray
63.) With a good perspective on history, we can have a better understanding of the past and present, and thus a clear vision of the future.
– Carlos Slim Helu
64.) Life has immense analogy with the stock market. It is volatile, but if you stick on long enough, it has the potential to reward you with handsome returns in the long run.
– Manoj Arora
Warren Buffet quotes on investing
Warren Buffet is CEO of Berkshire Hathaway and known as the Oracle of Omaha. He is one of the most successful investors in the world with a net worth over $85 billion.
65.) I will tell you the secret to getting rich on Wall Street. You try to be greedy when others are fearful. And you try to be fearful when others are greedy.
– Warren Buffett
66.) Games are won by players who focus on the playing field –- not by those whose eyes are glued to the scoreboard.
– Warren Buffett
67.) The first rule of investment is: Don’t Lose. And the second rule of investment is: Don’t forget the first rule.
– Warren Buffett
68.) Wide diversification is only required when investors do not understand what they are doing.
– Warren Buffett
69.) It’s nice to have a lot of money, but you know, you don’t want to keep it around forever. I prefer buying things. Otherwise, it’s a little like saving sex for your old age.
– Warren Buffett
70.) When the tide goes out, you see who’s swimming naked.
– Warren Buffet
71.) In fact, when we own portions of outstanding businesses with outstanding managements, our favorite holding period is forever.
– Warren Buffett
72.) I don’t look to jump over seven-foot bars; I look around for one-foot bars that I can step over.
– Warren Buffett
More investing thoughts from Warren Buffett
73.) Ultimately, there’s one investment that supersedes all others: Invest in yourself.
– Warren Buffett
74.) Opportunities come infrequently. When it rains gold, put out the bucket, not the thimble.
– Warren Buffett
75.) The most important quality for an investor is temperament, not intellect.
– Warren Buffett
76.) Investors should be skeptical of history-based models. Constructed by a nerdy-sounding priesthood using esoteric terms such as beta, gamma, sigma and the like, these models tend to look impressive. Too often, though, investors forget to examine the assumptions behind the models. Beware of geeks bearing formulas.
– Warren Buffett
77.) If you aren’t thinking about owning a stock for ten years, don’t even think about owning it for ten minutes.
– Warren Buffett
Wall Street sayings from Benjamin Graham
The economist, investor, and professor Benjamin Graham is known as the “father of value investing.” He authored the seminal investing texts The Intelligent Investor and Security Analysis.
78.) Price is what you pay. Value is what you get.
– Benjamin Graham
79.) Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
– Benjamin Graham
80.) The individual investor should act consistently as an investor and not as a speculator.
– Benjamin Graham
81.) The investor’s chief problem — and even his worst enemy — is likely to be himself.
– Benjamin Graham
82.) The intelligent investor is a realist who sells to optimists and buys from pessimists.
– Benjamin Graham
83.) But investing isn’t about beating others at their game. It’s about controlling yourself at your own game.
– Benjamin Graham
84.) 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
85.) To be an investor you must be a believer in a better tomorrow.
– Benjamin Graham
Bonus saying:
Just when you think you have the key to the market, they change the locks.
– Unknown
To wrap up this look at Wall Street sayings and quotes, we give the last word to Mark Twain: “History doesn’t repeat itself but it often rhymes.”
Thank you for reading about great Wall Street sayings from some of the most famous investing experts. You may also enjoy:
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By Greg Johnson | Published 2/18/2021
