Merton Miller Quotes

But the system of prices ruling the market not only transmits information in the light of which economic agents can mutually adjust their actions, it also provides them with an incentive to exercise economy in terms of money.

Short-sellers perform a useful function in the market as conduits of negative information, and shorts often complain that they are discriminated against by regulators.

Free markets work better when information is available.

The thing about markets, and I think the thing people don't understand about that, is markets are not kind, but they're very efficient. So when the marketplace determines an inefficiency in the system, it corrects that, and a market system that's left alone will reward good behavior and punish bad behavior.

Promoting the interaction of orders remains one of the most difficult, but crucially important, challenges we face concerning our national market system.

In an efficient market, at any point in time, the actual price of a security will be a good estimate of its intrinsic value.

I had always been interested in markets - specifically, the theory that in financial markets, goods will trade at a fair value only when everyone has access to the same information.

The markets are efficient over time.

The proposition is that prices reflect all available information, which in simple terms means since prices reflect all available information, there's no way to beat the market.

Markets have built in inefficiencies, serious inefficiencies which are well known.

I was convinced that the trading frequency measured a fundamental heartbeat of financial markets. Clearly it reflected the flow of information. It turns out also to be closely related to measures of liquidity.

Auctions create greater price discovery and liquidity, resulting in a very meaningful final auction price. If you were building a securities exchange today, an auction would be a core feature.

Information costs are reduced by the existence of large numbers of buyers and sellers. Under these conditions, prices embody the same information that would require large search costs by individual buyers and sellers in the absence of an organized market.

The generally accepted view is that markets are always right -- that is, market prices tend to discount future developments accurately even when it is unclear what those developments are. I start with the opposite view. I believe the market prices are always wrong in the sense that they present a biased view of the future.

The United States has the most sophisticated financial markets in the world, which does not leave much room to maneuver. But it also offers investors the greatest access to information and the ability to execute trades quickly and efficiently. So it is a mixed bag of opportunity.

The 1970s was the decade of developments in the new area of information economics. Search theory, which emphasized the need to gather information, was joined by models that featured asymmetric information, the case in which information differed across individual agents.

But we have to ask ourselves, what's the purpose of the stock market? It's supposed to be a source of capital for growing business. It's lost that purpose.

Commodity exchanges have a lot of advantages. One, you are helping transparency. Two, they are not political. It's institutional building. It can survive any environment, in theory.

Prices don't merely reflect what people think things ought to cost today; they also reflect what people expect items to cost tomorrow.

Market design is about understanding the details of markets in sufficient detail so that we can help fix them when they are broken.

When volume drops off, prices settle down. Volume is the force that turns stocks higher.

Goods move in response to price differences from points of low to points of higher price, the movement tending to obliterate the price difference and come to rest.

I don't entirely reject the idea of efficient markets. It needs updating.

Part of my advantage is that my strength is economic forecasting, but that only works in free markets, when markets are smarter than people. That's how I started. I watched the stock market, how equities reacted to change in levels of economic activity, and I could understand how price signals worked and how to forecast them.

The stock market is a discounter of all known information.