Jeremy Grantham Quotes
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I like to be right. I try not to miss the big ideas, forget the little ones, and try to get them right. End of job description.
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The individual is far better-positioned to wait patiently for the right pitch while paying no regard to what others are doing, which is almost impossible for professionals.
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Equities are boring; bonds are disgusting.
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There is a lot of pain still to be had in the equity markets, particularly aimed at the risky end of the spectrum. We think the fair value on the market is about a third lower in the U.S. . .
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You can't run the economy on BMWs alone. If the average person is in a pickle, how do you have a healthy economy?
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It is better to be lucky than good, but of course appropriate to aspire to both.
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We live on a finite planet. We have finite resources, and we're running out of good, arable land.
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I believe the only things that really matter in investing are the bubbles and the busts
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Remember that history always repeats itself. Every great bubble in history has broken. There are no exceptions.
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There is no single theory that is used in economics that considers the finite nature of resources. It's shocking.
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Market timing, by the way, is a tag some buy-and-hold investors use to put down anything that involves using your brain. These are the same people who like to watch the locomotive coming and get run down in the name of discipline.
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The stock market is overpriced. Everything is overpriced. Junk is king.
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The language "it's too late" is very unsuitable for most environmental issues. It's too late for the dodo and for people who've starved to death already, but it's not too late to prevent an even bigger crisis. The sooner we act on the environment, the better.
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You don't get rewarded for taking risk; you get rewarded for buying cheap assets. And if the assets you bought got pushed up in price simply because they were risky, then you are not going to be rewarded for taking a risk; you are going to be punished for it.
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The world is using up its natural resources at an alarming rate, and this has caused a permanent shift in their value. We all need to adjust our behavior to this new environment. It would help if we did it quickly.
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The pure administration of Graham-and-Doddery really needs a long-term lock-up like Warren Buffett has, or it will have occasional quite dreadful client problems.
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Profit margins are probably the most mean-reverting series in finance, and if profit margins do not mean-revert, then something has gone badly wrong with capitalism. If high profits do not attract competition, there is something wrong with the system and it is not functioning properly.
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I hate gold. It does not pay a dividend, it has no value, and you can't work out what it should or shouldn't be worth," he said. "It is the last refuge of the desperate.
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Volatility is a symptom that people have no idea of the underlying value-that they have stopped playing the asset game. They're not buying because it's a company with certain attributes. They're buying because the price is rising. People are playing games not related to any concept at all of what the long-term value of the enterprise is. And they know it.
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Some societies are also more optimistic than others: the U.S. and Australia are my two picks Tell a European you think there’s a housing bubble and you’ll have a reasonable discussion. Tell an Australian and you’ll have World War III. Been there, done that!
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If stocks are attractive and you don't buy, you don't just look like an idiot, you are an idiot.
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By background I'm both a Quaker and a Yorkshireman, which I like to call double jeopardy.
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The investment business has taught me – increasingly as the years have passed – that people, especially investors (and, I believe, Americans), prefer good news and wishful thinking to bad news; and that there are always vested interests to offer facile, optimistic alternatives to the bad news.
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...how little our side of the industry did to move its business to the more ethical firms and to make a fuss about conflicted or unethical behavior. Had a number of us moved our business, we might have slowed or even stopped the 30-year slide in conflicted, unethical behavior that we have experienced. I, for one, regret the modest nature of our moves. We all could have done more. We have tolerated a pretty nasty decline in standards. Shame on us.
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Think how weird profit margins are: We've got high unemployment and financial crises - and world record profit margins. People think the American market is very cheap. We don't. The market quite incorrectly gives full credit to today's earnings.
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Everyone asks about gold. This is the irony: just as Jim Grant tells us (correctly) that we all have faith-based paper currencies backed by nothing, it is equally fair to say that gold is a faith-based metal. It pays no dividend, cannot be eaten, and is mostly used for nothing more useful than jewelry. I would say that anything of which 75% sits idly and expensively in bank vaults is, as a measure of value, only one step up from the Polynesian islands that attached value to certain well-known large rocks that were traded.
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I find the parallels between how some investors refuse to recognise the trends and our reaction to some of our environmental challenges very powerful. There is an unwillingness to process unpleasant data.
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I would say that financial markets are very inefficient, and capable of extremes of being completely dysfunctional.
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Volatility is a symptom that people have no idea of the underlying value.
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The potential for alternative energy sources, mainly solar and wind power, to completely replace coal and gas for utility generation globally is, I think, certain. The question is only whether it takes 30 years or 70 years.
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