Contemporary Digest

Three quotes on money that seem well aligned.

First, from The Zurich Axioms:

Minor Axiom XIV – Never follow speculative fads. Often, the best time to buy something is when nobody else wants it.

Then from Warren Buffet:

Be fearful when others are greedy. Be greedy when others are fearful.

Finally, from David Swensen (Open Yale Courses) who considers the idea after looking at historical data:

I was looking at some of the contemporary literature, the popular literature, and there was an article in the Saturday Evening Post that basically said, you shouldn’t call stocks securities–that was a ridiculous thing to call them; they should be called insecurities because they were so risky. Of course, this attitude came at exactly the wrong time. If you put a dollar into small stocks in June of 1932, by the end of 2006, you would have had 159,000 times your money. Just at the point of maximum opportunity people were at the point of maximum bearishness about the equity markets.