Philip Carret Quotes

Despite the advantages of size, wealth, a good name and a long tradition, a large enterprise will cease to be profitable if the men at the head get hardening of the arteries or atrophy of the brain tissue or if their heirs prove unequal to inherited responsibilities. Momentum alone will not carry a business forward under such circumstances. Some younger and more aggressive group will assume the leadership of the industry.

The history of business the world over is full of examples of businesses which have grown from modest beginnings to stupendous earning power.

The novice soon learns that stocks are likely to maintain an upward or downward trend for long periods of time with minor interruptions of the major trend.

One point movements may be likened to the ripples of the stock market, whose occurrence may be influenced by so great a multitude of factors that it is impossible to forecast them. Ten-point movements may perhaps be compared to waves.

The general state of business thus does not forecast the course of stock prices except in the apparently paradoxical fashion that great prosperity affords an advantageous time for selling stocks, extreme business depression an opportunity for purchase.

Anomalies are always to be found in the business situation.

The fabric of civilization today is woven of millions of threads. No spot in it is so strong that it will not feel some effect from a weakening at any point.

Just as in the realm of pugilism, a few years of soft living will make a Dempsey easy prey for a Tunney, so a period of prosperity contains the seeds of its own destruction.

Finance has its anatomy and its physiology. The former is studied through the medium of balance sheets, the latter through income statements.

In finance, as in other fields, theory and practice sometimes differ.

The road to success in speculation is the study of values.

Even in the highest grade securities, there is a certain inescapable speculative risk.

The factors that affect the state of what we call "general business" are innumerable.

The man in the street associates the acquisition of wealth with rising markets; failures, ruin, depression, panics with falling markets.

The average trader is naturally a chronic bull. It is human nature to prefer optimism to pessimism.

In a public service corporation, bad management may curtail profits or produce losses, good management may turn a weak corporation into a strong one.

Most useful and most dangerous are the stock market averages, most useful in revealing the general trend of the market, most dangerous if they mislead the trader into forgetting that, after all, his profits depend on the movements of the individual stocks in which he deals.

Individual stocks may obviously pursue courses widely dissimilar.

Fashions play their part in the stock market as in other affairs of life.

In analyzing stocks, industrials or otherwise, the speculator must constantly bear in mind that no two companies are strictly comparable. He must always be prepared to make due allowance for points of unlikeness.

Stocks often sell at ridiculously low levels for considerable periods merely because few people know anything about them.

To lose money is the conventional penalty for bad judgment in speculation.

The obvious fact about security prices to any student of the market is that they fluctuate.

The official who keeps one eye on his business and one on the stock market is not likely long to be numbered among the leaders.

It is usually a much simpler matter to forecast a bull market than to call the turn at its end.

Bull markets and bear markets last long enough so that the average trader is likely to forget by the time the climax is approaching that any sort of movement is possible.

Economic history never repeats itself exactly.

It takes a great deal of nerve to cling to a short position in a stock in the face of an advancing market even though the stock may clearly be overvalued.

To consider stocks by groups rather than by individual companies is further to ignore the vital factor of management.