David Wessel Quotes

All market response results from a reduction of uncertainty.

Fundamentals make the market.

Predicting the market is always tough.

Markets are self-regulating only because some brave investors are prepared to bet against the market trend.

I don’t know why the Stock Market does what it does.

More and more investors may be coming into markets everywhere but that doesn't mean that the markets are really getting more and more efficient, even in the United States. It does mean that there is more access for savvy investors who watch the money flows.

A second reason why science cannot replace judgement is the behavior of financial markets.

Markets love volatility.

The markets were run by mathematicians and their models but they had no business sense.

A free-enterprise economy depends only on markets, and according to the most advanced mathematical macroeconomic theory, markets depend only on moods: specifically, the mood of the men in the pinstripes, also known as the Boys on the Street.

The one thing about markets is that they do not give any advance notice. If they did, they would be arbitraged away.

I believe, in the stock market - that's one of my fields - that most people are irrational. And to be irrational, you can be irrational in so many different ways that, practically, the result is indeterminate.

The correct attitude of the security analyst toward the stock market might well be that of a man toward his wife. He shouldn't pay too much attention to what the lady says, but he can't afford to ignore it entirely. That is pretty much the position that most of us find ourselves vis-à-vis the stock market.

One of the funny things about the stock market is that every time one person buys, another sells, and both think they are astute.

Wall Street is always too biased toward short-term profitability and biased against long-term growth.

In college I started studying the stock market. I went down to the stock exchange, watched all the activity from the visitors' gallery, people running around, calling numbers, shouting, and all the paper flying and the bells ringing, and of course that was exciting, and it seemed to lend itself to my analytical skills.

As financial markets continue to broaden and deepen, the behavior of asset prices will play an important role in the formulation of monetary policy going forward, perhaps a more important role than in the past.

I think the value of venues like CNBC is that they give investors an opportunity to reevaluate the situation minute by minute, but maybe we don't need to follow the market so closely.

The techniques I developed for studying turbulence, like weather, also apply to the stock market.

I'm not a Wall Street expert, but I can read the papers.

In the world I've known most of my life, old stories quickly lose their power over capital markets and get replaced by new surprises. That which everyone fixates on gets priced into the stock market quickly and can't drag on.

You can no longer buy commodities at Merrill Lynch. My guess is many analysts and even executives are too young to know how profitable a hot commodities market can be. They will soon.

The American public historically was really not part of the stock market.

When the weather changes, nobody believes the laws of physics have changed. Similarly, I don't believe that when the stock market goes into terrible gyrations its rules have changed.

At the end of the day, the markets are my passion.