Quotes on Wall Street

I think I am safe in asserting that the margin trader, speculator, gambler, or whatever you choose to designate the average man who goes to Wall Street after easy money, does not lose money when he sells. He loses it when he buys!

You can't imagine how many shrewd, experienced business men forget in Wall Street what it took them years to learn.

Wall Street in boom days is an aggregation of madmen. The Stock Exchange becomes Bedlam well dressed.

When I shifted my focus from beating gambling games to analyzing the stock market, I naively thought that I was leaving a world where cheating at cards was then problematic and entering an arena where regulation and the rule of law gave investors a fair playing field. Instead, I learned that bigger stakes attracted bigger thieves.

Most people on Wall Street don't have principles to begin with. And if they have them, they don't stick to them.

Many things are possible in Wall Street. But neither there nor anywhere else has a man ever prospered by trying to hog it.

In Wall Street, what has happened before will happen again. It must, as you will admit if you stop to think about it.

Suppose you bought a stock cheap when it was a relatively obscure situation, and then a half-dozen Wall Street firms started cheering for the stock at the same time. I'd get concerned and think about selling. I don't like bandwagons. I'd rather do my own thing.

While Wall Street may not like rules, it adjusts its thinking immediately to the question of what pays off under any new rules that are promulgated.

Whatever can be sold, Wall Street will provide.

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.

One of the illusions that people on Wall Street have is that they can have perfect information on a stock.

New financial products are typically created for sunny days and are almost never stress-tested for stormy weather.

One of the oldest sayings on Wall Street is "Let your winners run, and cut your losers." It's easy to make a mistake and do the opposite, pulling out the flowers and watering the weeds.

It's in the nature of Wall Street to imagine that whenever a company sets a record for earnings, it will go on setting new ones.

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.”

If we assume that a very considerable amount of Wall Street activity must inevitably have elements of chance in it, then the sound idea would be to measure these chances as accurately as you can, and play the game in the direction of having the odds on your side.

Wall Street has a beautiful collection of very ancient and often very incorrect traditions.

Wall Street has always been much esteemed as something to blame.

The Street, unfortunately, is fairly well inured to the bursting of bubbles.

I don't see how you can say that the prices made in Wall Street are the right prices in any intelligent definition of what right prices would be.

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.

There are two requirements for success in Wall Street. One, you have to think correctly; and secondly, you have to think independently.

I insist that more damage has been done to stock values and to the future of equities from inside Wall Street than from outside Wall Street.