Quotes on Market History

Real life is not a random draw but a connected sequence of events in which each event is the consequence of the preceding event.

Volatility is not risk. And historic volatility does not necessarily project future volatility.

I think investors always learn the lessons of the recent past. And that is the lesson.

All of history and all of life is stuffed full of the unexpected and the unthinkable.

The constant lesson of history is the dominant role played by surprise. Just when we are most comfortable with an environment and come to believe we finally understand it, the ground shifts under our feet.

While we can learn from the long run about how bonds and stocks respond to changing environments and to each other, the long run can tell us perilously little about what kinds of environments lie ahead.

What you learn from history is the market goes down. It goes down a lot.

The strange revolutions wrought by time are nowhere so evident as in the securities market, where an accurate comparison of the present with the past is afforded by the price record over a period of years.

They used to say about the Bourbons that they forgot nothing and they learned nothing, and I'll say about the Wall Street people, typically, is that they learn nothing, and they forget everything.

It is a safe prediction for me to make that, in future years as in the past, common stocks will advance too far and decline too far, and that investors, like speculators -- and institutions, like individuals -- will have their periods of enchantment and disenchantment with equities.

I think the future of equities will be roughly the same as their past; in particular, common stock purchases will prove satisfactory when made at appropriate price levels.

No prediction -- whether of a repetition of past patterns or of a complete break with past patterns -- can be proved in advance to be right.

Experience in former markets indicates that just as they are too high in bull markets, they get too low in bear markets.

Economic history never repeats itself exactly.

I believe that the trend of stock equities will continue in the future as it has in the past -- and that is irregularly upward, with some emphasis upon the adverb irregularly.

The broad pattern of market action in the past is the best guide to the future -- but it is not an infallible guide.