If investing is entertaining, if you're having fun, you're probably not making any money. Good investing is boring.
Interpretation
Successful investing requires discipline and patience rather than excitement and entertainment.
This quote by George Soros highlights the idea that effective investing is not about entertainment or excitement, but rather about careful analysis and a methodical approach. When investing is reduced to a form of entertainment, it often leads to poor decision-making and losses, as the focus shifts from sound strategies to immediate gratification and thrill.
In practice
This quote can be used in a finance seminar to stress the importance of a disciplined approach to investing.
The securitisation of mortgages added a new dimension of systemic risk. Financial engineers claimed they were reducing risks through geographic diversification: in fact they were increasing them by creating an agency problem. The agents were more interested in maximising fee income than in protecting the interests of bondholders. That is the verity that was ignored by regulators and market participants alike.
The collapse of the global marketplace would be a traumatic event with unimaginable consequences. Yet I find it easier to imagine than the continuation of the present regime.
Regulating and taxing marijuana would simultaneously save taxpayers billions of dollars in enforcement and incarceration costs, while providing many billions of dollars in revenue annually.
We are the most powerful nation on earth. No external power, no terrorist organization can defeat us. But we can defeat ourselves by getting caught in a quagmire.
My foundations support people in the country who care about an open society. It's their work that I'm supporting. So it's not me doing it. But I can empower them. I can support them, and I can help them.
The criminalization of marijuana did not prevent marijuana from becoming the most widely used illegal substance in the United States and many other countries. But it did result in extensive costs and negative consequences.
Assets put money in your pocket, whether you work or not, and liabilities take money from your pocket.
Donβt buy luxuries until youβve built the assets to afford them
Don't invest in what you don't know. Learn first then invest.
Most women file for bankruptcy in the aftermath of a serious medical problem, a job loss, or a family break up. It is hard to protect against those.
When somebody asserts that a stock has an earning power of so much, I am sure that the person who hears him doesn't know what he means, and there is a good chance that the man who uses it doesn't know what it means.
The problem that people don't understand is that active managers, almost by definition, have to be poorly diversified. Otherwise, they're not really active. They have to make bets. What that means is there's a huge dispersion of outcomes that are totally consistent with just chance. There's no skill involved it. It's just good luck or bad luck.
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