Quotes on Uncertainty

Too many investors fail to follow some simple, time-tested tenets that improve the odds of achieving success and, at the same time, reduce the anxiety naturally associated with an uncertain undertaking.

Equilibrium applies best only to markets that deal with known quantities. But financial markets deal with quantities that are not only largely unknown but unkownable.

People often say there's lots of uncertainty, but when was there ever certainty in the markets, the economy, or the future? I'm just trying to understand the present.

We use the term risk all too casually, and the term uncertainty all too rarely.

Volatility matters, because it defines the uncertainty of the price at which an asset will be liquidated.

The P/E ratio is only a reflection of what most investors expect to happen at a point in time, and that is neither here nor there in terms of what actually will happen.

Businessmen play a mixed game of skill and chance, the average results of which to the players are not known by those who take a hand.

Uncertainty actually is the friend of the buyer of long-term values.

History does not tell you of future things happening.

I'm in the insurance business, and anything that can happen will happen.

What you really want to do in investments is figure out what’s important and knowable. If it's unimportant or unknowable, you forget about it.

The greatest tragedies occur when people forget about uncertainty.

Equities are a claim on uncertain future earnings.

Prices change when events are different from what the market has expected them to be.

It's not earnings changes that cause stock price changes, but earnings changes that come as a surprise.

We try to protect against tail risk: the risk of unlikely but possible events that could be catastrophic.

You must always be prepared for the unexpected, including sudden, sharp downward swings in markets and the economy. Whatever adverse scenario you can contemplate, reality can be far worse.

In investing, nothing is certain. The best investments we have ever made, that in retrospect seem like free money, seemed not at all that way when we made them.

It is not really within human nature to comprehend that you may not know everything you think you know, and, further, that what you believe in could change on a dime.

We naturally fear the unknown, and the future is always unknown.

No matter how calm you are, no matter how long term an investor you are, no matter what your horizons, when the market is jumping around, you feel uncertainty in your gut and it's hard to resist that.

The main thing that experience taught me was a sense of humility and an awareness of the importance of surprise, that is, unexpected things happen.

The most important lesson an investor can learn is to be dispassionate when confronted by unexpected and unfavorable outcomes.

Survival as an investor over that famous long course depends from the very first on recognition that we do not know what is going to happen. We can speculate or calculate or estimate, but we can never be certain.

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.

Risk in our world is nothing more than uncertainty about the decisions that other human beings are going to make and how we can best respond to those decisions.

At its root, risk is about mystery. It focuses on the unknown, for there would be no such thing as risk if everything were known.

Risk is about dealing with problems to which there is no certain solution.

I think that we only get estimates of the distributions and that we can only be somewhat sure of the estimates. That makes the problems in the financial world much more difficult, I think, because you have these uncertainties in the distributions.

The investor must recognize that there are uncertain, and hence, speculative elements inherent in any policy he follows.

It's not uncertainty as such that bothers us, but unknowledge.