Quotes on Turnover

Individual investors tend to churn their accounts, they tend to trade too much, and that they trade too much seems to be due to over-confidence. They believe they know something that they do not know and this is one essential characteristic of human beings, which makes them different from rational beings.

You only need one or two good stocks a decade. You don't need a lot of action.

We are sort of the polar opposites of a lot of investors. We do a lot of thinking and not a lot of acting. A lot of investors do a lot of acting, and not a lot of thinking.

The more you trade, the harder it is to add value because you’re absorbing a lot of transaction costs, not to mention taxes.

The disadvantage of being in any kind of a market type environment - Wall Street would be the extreme - is that you get over-stimulated. You think you have to do something every day.

Wall Street makes its money on activity. You make your money on inactivity.

I think there’s a tendency in the modern world of people wanting their money to be working hard, and I joke that our money is like a couch potato by comparison.

Wall Street has this wonderful business about how to create transactions. They set up what we believe are false expectations, and that’s what I call the “beat by a penny, missed by a penny syndrome.”

It's now a rent-a-stock industry, compared with the old own-a-stock industry when turnover was 16 percent and the average holding period was six years.