Investing should be more like watching paint dry or watching grass grow. If you want excitement, take $800 and go to Las Vegas.
Interpretation
Investing should be approached with patience and not as a source of excitement.
This quote by Paul Samuelson emphasizes that investing is a slow and steady process that requires patience, and it should not be viewed as a thrilling endeavor. Instead of seeking immediate excitement and action, one should understand that successful investing is about long-term growth, much like the gradual changes we observe in nature.
In practice
A financial advisor might use this quote to educate clients about the importance of a long-term investment strategy.
To a person of analytical ability, perceptive enough to realise that mathematical equipment was a powerful sword in economics, the world of economics was his or her oyster in 1935. The terrain was strewn with beautiful theorems begging to be picked up and arranged in unified order.
I can't think of a president who has been overburdened by a knowledge of economics.
My belief is that nothing that can be expressed by mathematics cannot be expressed by careful use of literary words.
Politicians like to tell people what they want to hear - and what they want to hear is what won't happen.
My family was well off but not rich. I spent the four years I was an undergraduate working on the beach. And it wasn't because I was lazy; it was because my freshman class would go to a hundred different employers and wouldn't get a nibble. That was a disequilibrium system. I realized that the ordinary old-fashioned Euclidean geometry didn't apply.
Economics has never been a science - and it is even less now than a few years ago.
The miracle of compounding returns has been overwhelmed by the tyranny of compounding costs.
The stock market is a wonderfully efficient mechanism for transferring wealth from the impatient to the patient.
The math you need for most of finance is ninth-grade algebra, and most people feel reasonably comfortable with that. But I think the financial world there has been - I don't know if it's by design, or this is how it's evolved - there are bad actors who have wanted to obfuscate because you can benefit from the lack of transparency.
We make too much out of past performance, and it's very misleading to investors. It causes them to move money around. They buy a fund that's hot and then it turns cold as all hot funds eventually do. And then they get out. Well, buying at the high and selling at the low isn't going to leave you a satisfied shareholder, right?
Investors should invest on what they know. The biggest mistake is to invest on what they don't know.
I am more and more impressed with the possibilities of history's repeating itself on many different counts. You don't get very far in Wall Street with the simple, convenient conclusion that a given level of prices is not too high.
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