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Quotes on Uncertainty

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Quote Authors

Arnold Van Den Berg, Arthur Rock, Benjamin Graham, Bernard Baruch, Bill Miller, Charles Ellis, Charlie Munger, Chris Browne, Chuck Akre, Daniel Kahneman, David Abrams, David Swensen, Dean LeBaron, Dean Williams, Edward Thorp, Edwin Lefevre, Fred Schwed Jr, George Soros, Henry Singleton, Hetty Green, Howard Marks, Joel Greenblatt, John Bogle, John Kenneth Galbraith, John Maynard Keynes, John Neff, John Stuart Mill, John Templeton, Lou Simpson, Marty Whitman, Meir Statman, Michael Price, Mohnish Pabrai, Myron Scholes, Paul Tudor Jones, Peter Bernstein, Peter Cundill, Peter Lynch, Philip Carret, Philip Fisher, Richard Thaler, Robert Kirby, Robert Shiller, Robert Wilson, Seth Klarman, Stanley Druckenmiller, T. Rowe Price, Walter Schloss, Warren Buffett,

“
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.
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Bill Miller
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We use the term risk all too casually, and the term uncertainty all too rarely.
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John Bogle
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Volatility matters, because it defines the uncertainty of the price at which an asset will be liquidated.
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Peter Bernstein
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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.
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Peter Bernstein
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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.
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John Maynard Keynes
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Uncertainty actually is the friend of the buyer of long-term values.
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Warren Buffett
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History does not tell you of future things happening.
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Warren Buffett
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I'm in the insurance business, and anything that can happen will happen.
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Warren Buffett
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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.
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Warren Buffett
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The greatest tragedies occur when people forget about uncertainty.
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Peter Bernstein
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Equities are a claim on uncertain future earnings.
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Peter Bernstein
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Prices change when events are different from what the market has expected them to be.
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Peter Bernstein
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It's not earnings changes that cause stock price changes, but earnings changes that come as a surprise.
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Howard Marks
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We try to protect against tail risk: the risk of unlikely but possible events that could be catastrophic.
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Seth Klarman
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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.
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Seth Klarman
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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.
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Seth Klarman
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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.
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Seth Klarman
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We naturally fear the unknown, and the future is always unknown.
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Peter Bernstein
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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.
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Peter Bernstein
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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.
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Peter Bernstein
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The most important lesson an investor can learn is to be dispassionate when confronted by unexpected and unfavorable outcomes.
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Peter Bernstein
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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.
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Peter Bernstein
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All of history and all of life is stuffed full of the unexpected and the unthinkable.
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Peter Bernstein
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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.
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Peter Bernstein
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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.
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Peter Bernstein
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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.
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Peter Bernstein
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Risk is about dealing with problems to which there is no certain solution.
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Peter Bernstein
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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.
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Edward Thorp
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The investor must recognize that there are uncertain, and hence, speculative elements inherent in any policy he follows.
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Benjamin Graham
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It's not uncertainty as such that bothers us, but unknowledge.
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Peter Bernstein
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