RON CHERNOW

In the 1920s, Wall Street was a world that was really dominated by professional speculators and stock pools. These people had a monopoly over information.

I don't think that a mutual fund that invests exclusively in biotech start-ups or invests exclusively in companies in Thailand offers any great safety or diversification.

In the 1970s we saw a massive shift of household savings from the banks to the brokerage firms.

A crash really occurs when you suddenly have a violent downturn in the market that then heralds a long bull market.

There were two qualities about the mutual funds of the 1920s that made them extremely speculative. One was that they were heavily leveraged. Two, mutual funds were allowed to invest in other mutual funds.

Mutual funds give people the sense that they're investing with the big boys and that they're really not at a disadvantage entering the stock market.

There is no country in the world where it's as easy to find venture capital in the stock market as the United States.

You don't want too much fear in a market, because people will be blinded to some very good buying opportunities. You don't want too much complacency because people will be blinded to some risk.

If you go back to the time of J.P. Morgan, the world of high finance was completely wholesale. The prestigious investment banks on Wall Street appealed exclusively to large corporations, governments, and to extremely wealthy individuals.

As a bull market continues, almost anything you buy goes up. It makes you feel that investing in stocks is a very easy and safe and that you're a financial genius.

When the market is just going up, up, and up, we all tend to be blind to the holes in the market. They're all papered over by the rise.

We really haven't had very much experience with people funding their retirement out of the stock market, and we don't know, frankly, how it would work under every scenario.

After being Washington's aide for four years and becoming the hero of Yorktown, Hamilton was viewed with a great deal of suspicion because of his association with Tories.

The securities laws of the 1930s were so important because it forced companies to file registration statements and issue prospectuses, and it remedied the imbalance of information.

That strategy of buy and hold, which is the sound and sensible one for the individual, can have very dangerous and perverse effects for the market as a whole.

One of the very nice things about investing in the stock market is that you learn about all different aspects of the economy. It's your window into a very large world.

I think those who invest in mutual funds want someone else to do the thinking for them. But the fact that they can move the money around the family of mutual funds just through a phone call lets them feel that they can play tycoons.

Once the brokerage house, rather than the bank, became the locus for American savings, that money would find its way into the stock market, because the broker was someone with a much higher tolerance for risk than the banker.

After 1929, so many people had been traumatized by the stock market crash that there was a lost generation.

The mutual fund industry and small investors are very relentless and very unforgiving if people don't perform.

Mutual fund managers are trapped in this rather deadly vicious circle: the more successful they are, the more money flows into their mutual fund. Then, it is more difficult for them to beat the market averages or even to match their own past performance.

There is a kind of fear, approaching a panic, that's spreading through the Baby Boom Generation, which has suddenly discovered that it will have to provide for its own retirement.

Stock market corrections, although painful at the time, are actually a very healthy part of the whole mechanism, because there are always speculative excesses that develop, particularly during the long bull market.

One of the special characteristics of New York is that it is different from a London or a Paris because it's the financial capital, and the cultural capital, but not the political capital.

Hamilton had one of those extraordinary 18th-century minds that touched on virtually every major topic of the day.