Jane Bryant Quinn – You don’t need 99.9% of what Wall Street is selling. It’s expensive, unsuitable, or stupid. Most investments are designed to profit the brokers, banks, and insurance companies, not you. They should carry a warning label, “Beware! This financial product may be injurious to your wealth!”
Jack Meyer – The investment business is a giant scam. Most people think they can find managers who can outperform, but most people are wrong. I will say that 85 to 90 percent of managers fail to match their benchmarks. Because managers have fees and incur transaction costs, you know that in the aggregate they are deleting value. You want to keep your fees low. That means avoiding the most hyped but expensive funds, in favor of low-cost index funds.
John Bogle – Fund investors are confident that they can easily select superior fund managers. They are wrong. Index funds eliminate the risks of individual stocks, market sectors, and manager selection. Only stock market risk remains. Don’t look for the needle, buy the haystack.
William Bernstein – You are engaged in a life-and-death struggle with the financial services industry. Every dollar in fees, expenses, and spreads you pay them comes directly out of your pocket. If you act on the assumption that every broker, insurance salesman, mutual fund salesperson, and financial advisor you encounter is a hardened criminal, you will do just fine.
Charles Ellis – Don’t get confused by stockbrokers and mutual fund salespeople. They are usually very nice people, but their job is not to make money for you. Their job is to make money from you.
Larry Swedroe – Passive investing may have the “disadvantage” of being boring. However, it guarantees that you receive market returns in a low-cost and tax-efficient manner if you have the discipline to adhere to your investment policy statement. It also frees you from spending any time at all watching CNBC, studying charts, following Internet discussion sites, and reading financial publications that are basically not much more than the equivalent of astrology.
Daniel Solin – Beware of brokers and insurance agents eager to escort your cash to another annuity. Investors get switched from one mediocre annuity to another all the time because brokers receive healthy commissions every time they convince someone to jump.
William Bernstein – 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 that they don’t know. Then again, there is a third type of investor, the investment professional, who indeed knows that he or she doesn’t know, but whose livelihood depends upon appearing to know.
Daniel Solin – Market timing, like stock picking is nothing but a shell game. You should never listen to anyone who says he or she can time the market, no matter how qualified or confident that person appears to be.
Larry Swedroe – Investing is simple but not easy because, while staying the course is easy when everything is going well, when bear markets inevitably arrive, the best-laid plans can end up in the trash heap of emotions.
John Bogle – Deep down, I remain absolutely confident that the vast majority of American families will be well served by owning their equity holdings in an all –U.S. stock-market index portfolio and holding their bonds in an all-U.S. bond-market index portfolio. …The rationale for a 100-percent-index-fund portfolio remains as solid as a rock. It’s all about common sense.
William Bernstein – No matter how you allocate your assets, you will always wish that you had assigned more to the best performer and nothing to the worst performer. Since no one can predict which these will be, the safest course is to own them all, and thereby, as best you can, assure yourself of not being devastated by an Enron or a Lehman. When you minimize your expenses and diversify, you forego bragging rights with the neighbors and in-laws, but you will also minimize the chances of impoverishing yourself and the ones you love.
Burton Malkiel – The only thing I’m absolutely 100% sure of is that the lower the fee I pay to the purveyor of the investment service, the more there is going to be for me. And that’s why index funds work.
Warren Buffett – Most investors, both institutional and individual, will find the best way to own common stocks is through an index fund that charges minimal fees. Those following this path are sure to beat the net results (after fees and expenses) delivered by the great majority of investment professionals.