Why do good buyers repeat the identical errors technology after technology? As a result of monetary instincts — like worry, envy, and overconfidence — are historical, cussed, and terribly unsuited for contemporary markets. Fortuitously, monetary historical past leaves behind a paper path of knowledge, wit, and hard-won classes. Generally, a single quote can do extra to appropriate a nasty behavior than 100 charts.
That’s what introduced us collectively. On March 19, 2025, I met Rachel Kloepfer. It was proper after my keynote presentation on the Second Annual Institute of Superior Funding Administration (IAIM) convention on the College of Utah. My discuss emphasised how buyers can use monetary historical past to achieve a deeper understanding of present monetary occasions and a clearer imaginative and prescient of the long run. I closed with just a few quotes from the previous — concise and enduring truths which I hoped attendees might use to make higher selections.
Afterward, Rachel — a former journalist and fellow monetary historical past fanatic — instructed increasing the listing. We sifted by a whole bunch of quotes. Some are severe, some are humorous, however all come from individuals who lived by the monetary highs and lows of the previous 200 years.
The result’s a curated set of 30 quotes completely for Enterprising Investor grouped by the vices to keep away from, the virtues to undertake, and a bit humor to remain sane by all of it. We selected timeless quotes designed to resonate throughout generations, reminders that whether or not you’re new to investing or many years into your profession, historical past nonetheless has one thing to show you.
VICES
Probably the most tragic errors in finance are these we might have averted — if solely we had realized from the previous. But these errors persist as a result of our instincts, as soon as important for survival, usually backfire in markets. Till evolution catches up, our greatest treatment is historic consciousness. The quotes that comply with spotlight a number of the most damaging investor vices. Committing them to reminiscence may also help you resist these patterns — and free the psychological capability wanted to domesticate extra productive virtues.
Envy
“Nothing so undermines your monetary judgement because the sight of your neighbor getting wealthy.”
—J. PIERPONT MORGAN, financier
Impatience
“The delusion lies within the conception of time. The good stock-market bull seeks to condense the long run into just a few days, to low cost the lengthy march of historical past, and seize the current worth of all future riches. It’s [their] strident demand for every little thing proper now — to personal the long run in cash proper now — that can’t tolerate even the notion of futurity.”
—JAMES BUCHAN, creator of Frozen Want: The Which means of Cash
Dishonesty
“A enterprise mannequin that depends on trickery is doomed to fail.”
—CHARLIE MUNGER, late vice chairman of Berkshire Hathaway
Hubris
“The weak point of human nature prevents males from being good judges of their very own deservings.”
—LOUIS BRANDEIS, creator of Different Folks’s Cash
Overconfidence
“When a speculator wins, he don’t cease until he loses.”
—GEORGE H. LORIMER, nineteenth century service provider
Complacency
“At all times keep in mind that someplace somebody is making a product that can make your product out of date.”
—GEORGES DORIOT, founding father of enterprise capital
Denial
“Confronted with the selection between altering one’s thoughts and proving that there isn’t any want to take action, nearly everyone will get busy on the proof.”
—JOHN KENNETH GALBRAITH, monetary historian
Overthinking
It’s outstanding how a lot long-term benefit individuals like us have gotten by attempting to be persistently not silly, as an alternative of attempting to be very clever.”
—CHARLIE MUNGER, late vice chairman of Berkshire Hathaway
Herd Conduct
“As soon as a majority of gamers adopts a heretofore contrarian place, the minority view turns into the extensively held perspective.”
—DAVID SWENSEN, late CIO of the Yale College Endowment
Blind Religion
“The investing public is fascinated and captured by the nice monetary thoughts. That fascination derives, in flip, from the size of the monetary operations and the sensation that, with a lot cash concerned, the psychological assets behind them can’t be much less.”
—JOHN KENNETH GALBRAITH, monetary historian
VIRTUES
Shedding dangerous instincts is simply the start. The following step is to fill that house with virtues — a much more troublesome activity. Vices are frequent and instinctive; virtues are behavioral anomalies. Probably the most highly effective virtues are uncommon, straightforward to dismiss, and even simpler to overlook. The next 10 quotes come from monetary minds who efficiently navigated a number of the most unforgiving markets in US historical past. Committing them to reminiscence is a robust subsequent step towards turning into a more proficient investor.
Ardour
“All of the genius I’ve lives on this: when I’ve a topic in hand, I research it profoundly. Day and evening it’s earlier than me. My thoughts turns into pervaded with it. Then the trouble that I’ve made is what persons are happy to name the fruit of genius. It’s the fruit of labor and thought.”
—ALEXANDER HAMILTON, first US Secretary of the Treasury
Thrift
“I smoke four-cent cigars and I like them. If I had been to smoke higher ones, I would lose my style for a budget ones that I now discover fairly passable.”
—EDWARD ROBINSON, father of Hetty Inexperienced, the Queen of Wall Road
Self-Self-discipline
“A number of many years would move, and lots of vicissitudes to be undergone earlier than I might grasp the best and most essential of all the foundations of fabric welfare: Probably the most good monetary technique consists of dwelling nicely inside one’s means.”
—BENJAMIN GRAHAM, founding father of the worth investing philosophy
Competence
“A small bunch of people that know what they’re doing can accomplish greater than an enormous group of people that don’t know what they’re doing.”
—ROBERT NOYCE, founding father of Intel Company
Historic Consciousness
“You may’t actually perceive what’s going on now until you perceive what got here earlier than.”
—STEVE JOBS, founding father of Apple Laptop
Training
“Correct training is one lengthy train in augmentation of excessive cognition in order that our knowledge turns into sturdy sufficient to destroy mistaken pondering maintained by resistance to vary.”
—CHARLIE MUNGER, late vice chairman of Berkshire Hathaway
Humility
“There’s a prudent maxim of the financial forecaster’s commerce that’s too usually ignored: Decide a quantity or decide a date, however by no means each.”
—PAUL A. VOLCKER, late chairman of the Federal Reserve
Warning
“In enterprise, don’t shut a discount till you will have mirrored upon it in a single day.”
—HETTY GREEN, the Queen of Wall Road
Perspective
“A peaceful and modest life brings extra happiness than the pursuit of success mixed with fixed restlessness.”
—ALBERT EINSTEIN, Nobel Prize Profitable Physicist
Self-Consciousness
“There’s one set of administration abilities wanted to begin an organization and one other set wanted to handle a much bigger firm. They’re hardly ever resident in the identical particular person.”
—DON VALENTINE, founding father of Sequoia Capital
HUMOR
Finance and investing should not generally related to humor, however when human vices are stretched to their limits, they usually produce conditions so outrageous it’s exhausting to not chortle. The next set of quotes comes from witnesses to a number of the extra insane moments in U.S. monetary historical past. We hope you could find humor within the madness.
“I attempt to spend money on companies which might be so great that an fool can run them. As a result of ultimately, one will.”
—WARREN BUFFETT, chairman of Berkshire Hathaway
“Within the historical past of each nice disaster, you can find some masterly little bit of stupidity set hearth to the oil-soaked rags.”
—EDWIN LEFEVRE, monetary journalist
“Durations of speculative frenzy all the time draw each scoundrels and suckers to Wall Road, the way in which a three-alarm hearth attracts onlookers and pickpockets.”
—ROBERT SOBEL, monetary historian
“I’ve a number of enemies…I inform you the satan would worry me, as lots of his satellites do right here.”
—HETTY GREEN, the Queen of Wall Road
“It was an absurd signal of the instances that ‘enhanced leverage’ had grow to be a promoting level for an funding car, as an alternative of a warning; it was like naming a brand new automobile mannequin after its defective brakes.”
—TIMOTHY GEITHNER, former secretary of the Treasury
“Upon discovering the character of the ruse, their rage was, as might be imagined, unbounded however fruitless, and so they had been obliged to content material themselves with asserting in a really emphatic method that if [Jacob] Little ever visited Boston, he would inevitably half firm along with his ears.”
—WILLIAM ARMSTRONG, a reformed inventory gambler (1848)
“When you have any cash in that place [the Knickerbocker Trust], get it out the very first thing tomorrow. The lads in that financial institution are too good trying. You mark my phrases.”
—HETTY GREEN, the Queen of Wall Road
“Males have been swindled by different males on many events. The Autumn of 1929 was, maybe, the primary event when males succeeded on a big scale in swindling themselves.”
—JOHN KENNETH GALBRAITH, monetary historian
“As a normal rule of thumb, the extra complexity in a Wall Road creation, the sooner and additional buyers ought to run.”
—DAVID SWENSEN, late CIO of the Yale Investments Workplace
“The commonest exit technique was that we misplaced all our cash.”
—JACK MELCHOR, enterprise capitalist
CLOSING THOUGHTS
The 235-year historical past of US finance is crammed with scoundrels, schemes, and spectacular missteps. So it’s truthful to ask: How can we stay assured in such a system? The reply is that monetary historical past can also be wealthy with heroism, ingenuity, and selflessness — forces which have steadily pushed progress. The trail ahead isn’t linear, however over time, this method has labored higher than the options.
That’s why it’s important to bridge generational gaps within the funding business and make sure that future leaders profit from the hard-earned classes of the previous. As data compounds, so can also a extra traditionally knowledgeable and self-aware monetary system.
Like lots of the insights shared right here, this one isn’t new. In 1940, Fred Schwed Jr. wrote The place Are the Prospects’ Yachts?, a basic that skewered Wall Road with unmatched humor — and nonetheless arrived on the identical conclusion we’ve. Capitalism is flawed, but it surely works. So we’ll let Schwed Jr. have the ultimate phrase. Regardless of our greatest efforts, we merely couldn’t say it higher.
“I’ve a sneaking fondness for that wretched previous hag, the capitalistic system, after watching the efficiency of her temperamental youthful rivals. I imagine we had higher protect our monetary equipment even with a lot of the nonsense nonetheless adhering to it. The way in which we’ve been introduced up, all of us have a passion for articles which might solely be made in crops costing tens of millions of {dollars}. Few of those articles will be produced by a fellow and his uncle working behind the storage. The one profitable methodology up to now devised for getting tens of millions out of the general public, for enterprises each good and dangerous, is a few system much like the devious mechanisms of Wall Road. . (Cash has often been raised from the general public by smacking the residents with the broad aspect of a saber, however the outcomes of this had been all the time lower than passable).
I’m prepared to submit an concept to the SEC that maybe they’ve considered themselves: they’re within the place of a physician who has just one affected person, with no prospect of getting one other. It will be a tactical error to kill this affected person, although a commendable scientific zeal prompts the physician to check out his complete shelf of pharmacopoeia on him. In spite of everything, there isn’t any actual hazard on this case of the affected person ever turning into cured.”
—FRED SCHWED JR., creator of The place are the Prospects’ Yachts
