William J. Bernstein Quotes

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.

99% of fund managers demonstrate no evidence of skill whatsoever.

It's the company itself, but most of these mutual fund companies, the guy who runs the company is just a fact totem and the guy who runs the money is the power. But we really don't know who they are.

Successful hedge funds will be entrepreneurial; it is the essence of the craft.

There's quite a bit of evidence that even professionals don't show any ability to pick stocks or to predict market rollbacks. Most of the people we identify as skilled based on returns have probably just been lucky.

Early in my career, we were just pure bottoms-up stock pickers.

Strategy is, above all else, the search for above average returns.

The scary truth is 96 percent of mutual funds fail to match the market, and the 4 percent that do, they're always changing.

Index investing outperforms active management year after year.

Zeroing in on the best sectors or the best regions of the world is great, but zeroing in on the very best individual stocks is the key to making truly impressive profits.

The ability to select stocks, manage them over time and know when to sell them is incredibly difficult, even for professional fund managers.

There's a tendency to look at investments in isolation. Investors focus on the risk of individual securities.

Well, I think the secret is if you have a lot of stocks, some will do mediocre, some will do okay, and if one of two of 'em go up big time, you produce a fabulous result. And I think that's the promise to some people.

I think over any period of time, especially if you don't use leverage, it is difficult to continually beat the S&P 500.

If I were to leave and raise a venture fund, I would have to find 10 or 100 LPs. They would all give me a bunch of money, and I would take a percentage of that to pay myself. They would expect me to invest that over the next three years, and they want that money back in seven or eight years.

Pension funds, endowments, and private investors trust Mitt Romney's former company Bain Capital enough to hand it billions of dollars in assets.

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

We monitor close to 50 companies globally that can be potential investment opportunities. I'd like to see DST as a significant global investment company in the Internet arena.

I'm sometimes accused of being hostile to mutual funds. That's not fair, really. There is a place for them. Still, I am hostile to one thing, which is trying to use funds to time your way in and out of the market. That's a recipe for very bad results.

Mutual fund managers want your money in their funds. They get paid based on assets under management.

Whether a tops-down or bottoms-up investor in bonds, stocks, or private equity, the standard analysis tends to judge an investor or his firm on the basis of how the bullish or bearish aspects of the cycle were managed.

With a regular venture fund, you raise, let's say, a billion dollars, and then over the next three or four years, you've got to invest that money; otherwise, the people who invested with you will say, 'What are you doing? You're just collecting fees on our money.'

There are a lot of idiot fund managers out there who add no value to the process at all.

Often, investors will discover a manager after he's had a terrific run, usually when he lands on a magazine cover somewhere. Invariably, funds swell up with new investor money just before they revert to their long-term averages.

We think the most important criteria for selecting an investment firm are the manager, team, and track record.