William J. Bernstein Quotes
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It's bad enough that you have to take market risk. Only a fool takes on the additional risk of doing yet more damage by failing to diversify properly with his or her nest egg. Avoid the problem-buy a well-run index fund and own the whole market.
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Bluntly put, there's no chance that your doctor, dentist, or attorney is a high-school dropout. Your stockbroker, however, just might be.
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The reason that 'guru' is such a popular word is because 'charlatan' is so hard to spell.
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There are two kinds of investors, be they large or small: those who don't know where the market is headed and those who don't know what they don't know. Then again, there is a third type of investor: the investment professional, who indeed knows he doesn't know, but whose livelihood depends upon appearing to know.
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Do the math. Expect catastrophes. Whatever happens, stay the course.
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No one in his right mind would walk into the cockpit of an airplane and try to fly it, or into an operating theater and open a belly. And yet they think nothing of managing their retirement assets. I've done all three, and I'm here to tell you that managing money is, in its most critical elements even more demanding than the first two.
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The purpose of investing is not to simply optimise returns and make yourself rich. The purpose is not to die poor.
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The definition of investment is the deferring ofpresent consumption for future consumption. So, you dohave to be willing to defer. And there are a couple of tricks that you can use to save money. One of them is simply to pay yourself first.
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You have to understand what market history looks like. What market history tells you is that the very, very best investments are made when things look the worst.
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You have to understand your own psychology. You have to understand that human beings weren't really designed to invest. We have all these emotions that are appropriate responses if you're being chased by a tiger, but they're terrible responses if you've got a 30-year time horizon to think about investment or when you're trying to manage investment over 30 years.