Burton Malkiel Quotes

Never buy anything from someone who is out of breath.

put time on your side. Start saving early and save regularly. Live modestly and don't touch the money that's been set aside.

It is not hard to make money in the market. What is hard to avoid is the alluring temptation to throw your money away on short, get-rich-quick speculative binges. It is an obvious lesson, but one frequently ignored.

I view investing as a method of purchasing assets to gain profit in the form of reasonably predictable income (dividends, interest, or rentals) and /or appreciation over the long term.

The greatest of all gifts is the power to estimate things at their true worth.

there are four factors that create irrational market behavior: overconfidence, biased judgments, herd mentality, and loss aversion.

Res tantum valet quantum vendi potest. (A thing is worth only what someone else will pay for it.)

A firm's income statement may be, likened to a bikini-what it reveals is interesting but what it conceals is vital.

Predicting the stock market is really predicting how other investors will change estimates they are now making with all their best efforts. This means that, for a market forecaster to be right, the consensus of all others must be wrong and the forecaster must determine in which direction-up or down-the market will be moved by changes in the consensus of those same active investors.

Tip of the Week If you bought $1,000 worth of Nortel stock one year ago, it would now be worth $49. If you bought $1,000 worth of Budweiser (the beer, not the stock) one year ago, drank all the beer, and traded in the cans for the nickel deposit, you would have $79. My advice to you…start drinking heavily.

In crowds it is stupidity and not mother-wit that is accumulated,” Gustave Le Bon noted in his 1895 classic on crowd psychology.

Nobody knows more than the market.

In the 1990s, the ratio of buy to sell recommendations climbed to 100 to 1, particularly for brokerage firms with large investment banking businesses.

Forecasts are difficult to make—particularly those about the future.

The index performance is not mediocre—it exceeds the results achieved by the typical active manager.

Finding the next Warren Buffett is like looking for a needle in a haystack. We recommend that you buy the haystack instead, in the form of a low-cost index fund.

There is nothing so disturbing to one’s well-being and judgment as to see a friend get rich.

Burton Malkiel’s wonderful book A Random Walk Down Wall Street.

Two-thirds of professionally managed funds are regularly outperformed by a broad capitalization-weighted index fund with equivalent risk, and those that do appear to produce excess returns in one period are not likely to do so in the next. The record of professionals does not suggest that sufficient predictability exists in the stock market to produce exploitable arbitrage opportunities.

You will never be allowed to buy the really good IPOs at the initial offering price. The hot IPOs are snapped up by the big institutional investors or the very best wealthy clients of the underwriting firm.

Look for growth situations with low price-earnings multiples. If the growth takes place, there’s often a double bonus—both the earnings and the multiple rise, producing large gains. Beware of very high multiple stocks in which future growth is already discounted. If growth doesn’t materialize, losses are doubly heavy—both the earnings and the multiples drop.

A couple, both age seventy-eight, went to a sex therapist’s office. The doctor asked, “What can I do for you?” The man said, “Will you watch us have sexual intercourse?” The doctor looked puzzled, but agreed. When the couple finished, the doctor said, “There’s nothing wrong with the way you have intercourse,” and charged them $50. The couple asked for another appointment and returned once a week for several weeks. They would have intercourse, pay the doctor, then leave. Finally, the doctor asked, “Just exactly what are you trying to find out?” The old man said, “We’re not trying to find out anything. She’s married and we can’t go to her house. I’m married and we can’t go to my house. The Holiday Inn charges $93 and the Hilton Inn charges $108. We do it here for $50, and I get $43 back from Medicare.

For many of us, trying to outguess the market is a game that is much too much fun to give up. Even if you were convinced you would not do any better than average, I'm sure that most of you with speculative temperaments would still want to keep on playing the game of selecting individual stocks with at least some portion of the money you invest.

In fact, the most profitable investments you will ever make are precisely at the times when pessimism is the most rampant.

You, far more than the market or the economy, are the most important factor in your long-term investment success.

There is one investment truism that, if followed, can dependably increase your investment returns: Minimize your investment costs. We

Financial forecasting appears to be a science that makes astrology look respectable.

as the public realized that an excess of paper currency creates no real wealth, only inflation.

As the economic historian Charles Kindleberger has stated, “There is nothing so disturbing to one’s well-being and judgment as to see a friend get rich.

And if you buy the new issue after it begins trading, usually at a higher price, you are even more certain to lose.

It is the definition of the time period for the investment return and the predictability of the returns that often distinguish an investment from a speculation. A speculator buys stocks hoping for a short-term gain over the next days or weeks. An investor buys stocks likely to produce a dependable future stream of cash returns and capital gains when measured over years or decades.

Similarly, the buy-and-hold investor who prudently holds a diversified portfolio of low-cost index funds through thick and thin is the investor most likely to achieve her long-term investment goals.

J. P. Morgan once had a friend who was so worried about his stock holdings that he could not sleep at night. The friend asked, “What should I do about my stocks?” Morgan replied, “Sell down to the sleeping point.

A stock selling at $100 per share with earnings of $10 per share would have the same P/E multiple (10) as a stock selling at $40 with earnings of $4 per share. It is the P/E multiple, not the price, that really tells you how a stock is valued in the market.

By buying a share in a “total market” index fund, you acquire an ownership share in all the major businesses in the economy. Index funds eliminate the anxiety and expense of trying to predict which individual stocks, bonds, or mutual funds will beat the market.

Daniel Kahneman has argued that this tendency to overconfidence is particularly strong among investors. More than most other groups, investors tend to exaggerate their own skill and deny the role of chance. They overestimate their own knowledge, underestimate the risks involved, and exaggerate their ability to control events.

Kahneman and Tversky concluded that losses were 2½ times as undesirable as equivalent gains were desirable. In other words, a dollar loss is 2½ times as painful as a dollar gain is pleasurable. People exhibit extreme loss aversion, even though a change of $100 of wealth would hardly be noticed for most people with substantial assets. We’ll see later how loss aversion leads many investors to make costly mistakes.

WHAT DOES IT ALL MEAN? The lessons of market history are clear. Styles and fashions in investors’ evaluations of securities can and often do play a critical role in the pricing of securities. The stock market at times conforms well to the castle-in-the-air theory. For this reason, the game of investing can be extremely dangerous. Another lesson that cries out for attention is that investors should be very wary of purchasing today’s hot “new issue.” Most initial public offerings underperform the stock market as a whole. And if you buy the new issue after it begins trading, usually at a higher price, you are even more certain to lose. Investors would be well advised to treat new issues with a healthy dose of skepticism. Certainly investors in the past have built many castles in the air with IPOs. Remember that the major sellers of the stock of IPOs are the managers of the companies themselves. They try to time their sales to coincide with a peak in the prosperity of their companies or with the height of investor enthusiasm for some current fad. In such cases, the urge to get on the bandwagon—even in high-growth industries—produced a profitless prosperity for investors.

A bubble starts when any group of stocks, in this case those associated with the excitement of the Internet, begin to rise. The updraft encourages more people to buy the stocks, which causes more TV and print coverage, which causes even more people to buy, which creates big profits for early Internet stockholders. The successful investors tell you at cocktail parties how easy it is to get rich, which causes the stocks to rise further, which pulls in larger and larger groups of investors. But the whole mechanism is a kind of Ponzi scheme where more and more credulous investors must be found to buy the stock from the earlier investors. Eventually, one runs out of greater fools.

The first concerns how an investor should choose among different types of broad-based index funds. The best-known of the broad stock market mutual funds and ETFs in the United States track the S&P 500 index of the largest stocks. We prefer using a broader index that includes more smaller-company stocks, such as the Russell 3000 index or the Dow-Wilshire 5000 index. Funds that track these broader indexes are often referred to as “total stock market” index funds. More than 80 years of stock market history confirm that portfolios of smaller stocks have produced a higher rate of return than the return of the S&P 500 large-company index. While smaller companies are undoubtedly less stable and riskier than large firms, they are likely—on average—to produce somewhat higher future returns. Total stock market index funds are the better way for investors to benefit from the long-run growth of economic activity.

The harsh truth is that the most important driver in the growth of your assets is how much you save, and saving requires discipline. Without a regular savings program, it doesn’t matter if you make 5 percent, 10 percent, or even 15 percent on your investment funds. The single most important thing you can do to achieve financial security is to begin a regular savings program and to start it as early as possible. The only reliable route to a comfortable retirement is to build up a nest egg slowly and steadily. Yet few people follow this basic rule, and the savings of the typical American family are woefully inadequate. It is critically important to start saving now. Every year you put off investing makes your ultimate retirement goals more difficult to achieve. Trust in time rather than in timing. As a sign in the window of a bank put it, little by little you can safely stock up a strong reserve here, but not until you start.

Only liars manage always to be out of the market during bad times and in during good times.

(dividends,

October. This is one of the peculiarly dangerous months to speculate in stocks in. The others are July, January, September, April, November, May, March, June, December, August and February. —Mark Twain, Pudd’nhead Wilson

persuasively, that

Rule 1: A rational investor should be willing to pay a higher price for a share the larger the growth rate of dividends and earnings.

It is the nature of an average that some investors will beat it.

Index your important money, then go have fun,” Burton Malkiel told me. “It’s better than going to the racetrack.” But, he said, limit yourself to 5% or less of your total assets or portfolio.

Investment advisory services, earnings forecasts, and chart patterns are useless.

Invariably, the hottest stocks or funds in one period are the worst performers in the next.

Any

Any investment that has become a topic of widespread conversation is likely to be hazardous to your wealth. It was true of gold in the early 1980s and Japanese real estate and stocks in the late 1980s. It was true of Internet-related stocks in the late 1990s and condominiums in California, Nevada, and Florida in the first decade of the 2000s, as well as bitcoin in 2017.

14 A LIFE-CYCLE GUIDE TO INVESTING There are two times in a man’s life when he should not speculate: when he can’t afford it, and when he can. —Mark Twain, Following the Equator INVESTMENT STRATEGY NEEDS to be keyed to one’s life cycle.

For those in their twenties, a very aggressive investment portfolio is recommended. At this age, there is lots of time to ride out the peaks and valleys of investment cycles, and you have a lifetime of earnings from employment ahead of you. The portfolio is not only heavy in common stocks but also contains a substantial proportion of international stocks, including the higher-risk emerging markets. As mentioned in chapter 8, one important advantage of international diversification is risk reduction. Plus, international diversification enables an investor to gain exposure to other growth areas in the world even as world markets become more closely correlated.

your investments have to produce a rate of return equal to inflation.

It turns out that the portfolio with the least risk had 18 percent foreign securities and 82 percent U.S. securities. Moreover, adding 18 percent EAFE stocks to a domestic portfolio also tended to increase the portfolio return.

The point is that market timers risk missing the infrequent large sprints that are the big contributors to performance.

Lynch calculated each potential stock’s P/E-to-growth ratio (or PEG ratio) and would buy for his portfolio only those stocks with high growth relative to their P/Es. This was not simply a low P/E strategy, because a stock with a 50 percent growth rate and a P/E of 25 (PEG ratio of ½) was deemed far better than a stock with 20 percent growth and a P/E of 20 (PEG ratio of

The implications are simple. If past prices contain little or no useful information for predicting future prices, there is no point in following technical trading rules. A simple policy of buying and holding will be at least as good as any technical procedure. Moreover, buying and selling, to the extent that it is profitable, tends to generate taxable capital gains.

research analysts were increasingly paid to be bullish rather than accurate. In one celebrated incident, an analyst who had the chutzpah to recommend that Trump’s Taj Mahal bonds be sold because they were unlikely to pay their interest was summarily fired by his firm after threats of legal retaliation from “The Donald” himself. (Later, the bonds did default.)

Winning the Loser’s Game,

In addition, your psychological makeup will influence the degree of risk you should assume. One investment adviser suggests that you consider what kind of Monopoly player you once were (or still are). Were you a plunger? Did you construct hotels on Boardwalk and Park Place? True, the other players seldom landed on your property, but

when they did, you could win the whole game in one fell swoop. Or did you prefer the steadier but moderate income from the orange monopoly of St. James Place, Tennessee Avenue, and New York Avenue? The answers to these questions may give you some insight into your psychological makeup with respect to investing.

There are two times in a man’s life when he should not speculate: when he can’t afford it, and when he can. —Mark Twain, Following the Equator INVESTMENT

Another lesson that cries out for attention is that investors should be very wary of purchasing today’s hot “new issue.” Most initial public offerings underperform the stock market as a whole. And if you buy the new issue after it begins trading, usually at a higher price, you are even more certain to lose.

Human nature likes order; people find it hard to accept the notion of randomness. No matter what the laws of chance might tell us, we search for patterns among random events wherever they might occur—not only in the stock market but even in interpreting sporting phenomena.

Tax-Exempt Money-Market Funds

Human nature likes order,” wrote the economist Burton Malkiel in his seminal book A Random Walk Down Wall Street. “People find it hard to accept the notion of randomness.

If you sit down at the table and can’t figure out who the sucker is, get up and leave because it’s you.

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.

any idiot can sell a one-dollar bill for eighty cents.” Flooz.com launched a special offer to American Express platinum card holders allowing them to buy $1,000 of Flooz currency for just $800. Shortly before declaring bankruptcy, Flooz itself was Floozed when Filipino and Russian gangs bought $300,000 of its currency using stolen credit card numbers.

YouTube also contains a treasure trove of lectures by nearly all of finance’s leading lights, strewn throughout its vast wasteland of misinformation. Tread carefully. A few wrong clicks and you’ll wind up with a QAnon conspiracist or a crypto bro. Of the names I’ve mentioned in this book, I’d search for John Bogle, Eugene Fama, Kenneth French, Jonathan Clements, Zvi Bodie, William Sharpe, Burton Malkiel, Charles Ellis, and Jason Zweig. Worthwhile finance podcasts abound. Start with the Economist’s weekly “Money Talks” and NPR’s Planet Money, although most of the latter’s superb coverage revolves around economics and relatively little around investing. Rick Ferri’s Boglehead podcast interviews cover mainly passive investing. Another financial podcast I highly recommend is Barry Ritholtz’s Masters in Business from Bloomberg. Podcasts are a rapidly evolving area. Lest you wear your ears out, you’ll need discretion to curate the burgeoning amount of high-quality audio. Research mutual funds. All the fund companies discussed in this book have sophisticated websites from which basic fund facts, such as fees and expenses, can be obtained, as well as annual and semiannual reports that list and tabulate holdings. If you’re researching a large number of funds, this gets cumbersome. The best way is to visit Morningstar.com. Use the site’s search function to locate the main page for the fund you’re interested in and click the “Expense” and “Portfolio” tabs to find the fund expense ratio and detailed data on the fund holdings. Click the “Performance” tab to see the fund’s return over periods ranging from a single day up to 15 years, and the “Chart” tab to compare the returns of multiple funds over a given interval. ***

According to Roger Ibbotson, who has spent a lifetime measuring returns from alternative portfolios, more than 90 percent of an investor’s total return is determined by the asset categories that are selected and their overall proportional representation. Less than 10 percent of investment success is determined by the specific stocks or mutual funds that an individual chooses.

has become increasingly clear to me that one’s capacity for risk-bearing depends importantly upon one’s age and ability to earn income from noninvestment sources. It

Thus, purchasing a fund holding all the stocks in a broad-based index will produce a portfolio that can be expected to do as well as any managed by professional security analysts.

A successful investor is generally a well-rounded individual who puts a natural curiosity and an intellectual interest to work.

In one celebrated incident, an analyst who had the chutzpah to recommend that Trump’s Taj Mahal bonds be sold because they were unlikely to pay their interest was summarily fired by his firm after threats of legal retaliation from “The Donald” himself. (Later, the bonds did default.)

There is no simple road to riches for you and your family. The secret to getting wealthy is that there is no secret. The only way to get rich—unless you inherit or marry a fortune or hit the lottery—is to get rich slowly. Start early and contribute as much as possible to your savings for as long as possible.

The secret to success and enjoyment in so many parts of life is to know your capabilities and stay within them. Similarly, the key to success in investing is to know yourself and invest within your investing capabilities and within your emotional capacities.

ETFs tend to have very low expense ratios, and they can be more tax efficient than mutual funds because they are able to sell holdings without generating a taxable event. This could be an advantage for taxable investors. However, brokerage commissions are charged on the purchase of ETFs, and for small and moderate purchases these commissions can overwhelm those other advantages. No-load indexed mutual funds typically have no purchase fees. However, if you are investing a lump sum (as, for example, when rolling over an established plan such as an IRA), an ETF may be an optimal choice.

The best choice for your equity investments is a fund indexed to the total world stock market. If you are truly uncomfortable investing in “foreign” stocks, you could choose a domestic total stock market fund. We recommend that you be diversified internationally because the United States represents less than half of the world’s economic activity and stock market capitalization. For your bonds, choose a total U.S. bond market index fund.

In David Copperfield, Charles Dickens’s character Wilkins Micawber pronounced a now-famous law: Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen pounds nineteen and six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result misery.

There are few, if any, absolute rules in saving and investing, but here’s ours: Never, never, never take on credit card debt. This rule comes as close as any to being an inviolable commandment. Scott

The secret of getting rich slowly but surely is the miracle of compound interest. Albert Einstein is said to have described compound interest as the most powerful force in the universe. The concept simply involves earning a return not only on your original savings but also on the accumulated interest that you have earned on your past investment of your savings.

Benjamin Franklin provides us with an actual rather than a hypothetical case. When Franklin died in 1790, he left a gift of $5,000 to each of his two favorite cities, Boston and Philadelphia. He stipulated that the money was to be invested and could be paid out at two specific dates, the first 100 years and the second 200 years after the date of the gift. After 100 years, each city was allowed to withdraw $500,000 for public works projects. After 200 years, in 1991, they received the balance—which had compounded to approximately $20 million for each city. Franklin’s example teaches all of us, in a dramatic way, the power of compounding. As Franklin himself liked to describe the benefits of compounding, “Money makes money. And the money that money makes, makes money.

This simple investment strategy—indexing—has outperformed all but a handful of the thousands of equity and bond funds that are sold to the public. But you wouldn’t know this when Wall Street throws everything but the kitchen sink at you to convince you otherwise. This is the plan we use ourselves for our retirement funds, and this is the plan we urge you to follow, too.

We have believed for many years that investors will be much better off bowing to the wisdom of the market and investing in low-cost, broad-based index funds, which simply buy and hold all the stocks in the market as a whole. As more and more evidence accumulates, we have become more convinced than ever of the effectiveness of index funds. Over 10-year periods, broad stock market index funds have regularly outperformed two-thirds or more of the actively managed mutual funds.

The average actively managed mutual fund charges about one percentage point of assets each year for managing the portfolio. It is the expenses charged by professional “active” managers that drag their return well below that of the market as a whole. Low-cost index funds charge only one-tenth as much for portfolio management. Index funds do not need to hire highly paid security analysts to travel around the world in a vain attempt to find “undervalued” securities. In

Of all the professional money managers, Warren Buffett’s record stands out as the most extraordinary. For over 40 years, Buffett’s company, Berkshire Hathaway, has earned a rate of return for his stockholders twice as large as the stock market as a whole. But that record was not achieved only by his ability to purchase “undervalued” stocks, as it is often portrayed in the press. Buffett buys companies and holds them. (He has suggested that the correct holding period for a stock is forever.)

A major advantage of indexing is that index funds are tax efficient. Actively managed funds can create large tax liabilities if you hold them outside your tax-advantaged retirement plans. To the extent that your funds generate capital gains from their portfolio turnover, this active trading creates taxable income for you. And short-term capital gains are taxed at ordinary income tax rates that can go well over 50 percent when state income taxes are considered. Index funds, in contrast, are long-term buy-and-hold investors and typically do not generate significant capital gains or taxable income. To

With no-load index funds, no transaction fees are levied on contributions. Moreover, mutual funds will automatically reinvest all dividends back into the fund whereas additional transactions could be required to reinvest ETF dividends. We recommend that individuals making periodic contributions to a retirement plan use low-cost indexed mutual funds rather than ETFs.

These very sad stories make all too clear the cardinal rule of investing: Broad diversification is essential.

Protect yourself: Every investor should always diversify.

What does diversification mean in practice? It means that when you invest in the stock market, you want a broadly diversified portfolio holding hundreds of stocks. For people of modest means, and even quite wealthy people, the way to accomplish that is to buy one or more low-cost equity index mutual funds. The fund pools the money from thousands of investors and buys a portfolio of hundreds of individual common stocks. The mutual fund collects all the dividends, does all the accounting, and lets mutual fund owners reinvest all cash distributions in more shares of the fund if they so wish.

Diversify across securities, across asset classes, across markets—and across time.

One asset class that belongs in most portfolios is bonds. Bonds are basically IOUs issued by corporations and government units. (The government units might be foreign, state and local, or government-sponsored enterprises such as the Federal National Mortgage Association, popularly known as Fannie Mae.) And just as you should diversify by holding a broadly diversified stock fund, so should you hold a broadly diversified bond fund.

Unlike common stocks, whose dividends and earnings fluctuate with the ups and downs of the company’s business, bonds pay a fixed dollar amount of interest. If the U.S. Treasury offers a $1,000 20-year, 5 percent bond, that bond will pay $50 per year until it matures, when the principal will be repaid. Corporate bonds are less safe, but widely diversified bond portfolios have provided reasonably stable interest returns over time.

So-called “total stock market” funds will include both real estate companies and commodity products. Broad equity diversification can be achieved with one-stop shopping.

Does achieving extremely broad diversification seem completely out of reach for ordinary investors? Fear not. There are broadly invested, very low-cost funds that can provide one-stop shopping solutions. We will recommend a broadly diversified United States total stock market index fund that includes real estate companies and commodity producers, including gold miners. We

You should diversify over time. Don’t make all your investments at a single time. If