Benoit Mandelbrot Quotes

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

Listen to market strategists, and a word that comes up a lot these days is 'volatility.'

The stock market is like a small row boat on a rough sea, bouncing around as it drifts, whereas the macro economy is like a large ocean liner, very ponderous and difficult to maneuver but without such a rough journey.

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.

Fundamentals make the market.

Predicting the market is always tough.

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.

I always tell my traders that they would've loved the 1990s because it was a fairly easy time to make money.

Nowhere does history indulge in repetitions so often or so uniformly as in Wall Street.

As I have said before, the daily machinations of the stock market are like a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

If I've learned anything as an economic analyst, it is that the stock market and economic winds can shift by the hour.

The good news is, the stock market is closed and it can't hurt us again until tomorrow.

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.

The financial markets generally are unpredictable. So that one has to have different scenarios... The idea that you can actually predict what's going to happen contradicts my way of looking at the market.

Our system is dynamic, always shifting gears. What I do is I build models to beat the market.

Markets are constantly in a state of uncertainty and flux and money is made by discounting the obvious and betting on the unexpected.

We don't think much about the up and down of the public market.

It's difficult to make your clients understand that there are certain days that the market will go up or down 2%, and it's basically driven by algorithms talking to algorithms. There's no real rhyme or reason for that. So it's difficult. We just try to preach long-term investing and staying the course.

You can't manage Wall Street. Wall Street has its own viewpoints on everything. I have always believed, if you manage your business correctly, Wall Street will take care of itself.

You have a class of investors and you have a class of speculators. The speculators historically haven't been big enough to cause the investors to doubt the long-term vision of stock.

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 amount of data and analysis available for free is a true example of information explosion has leveled the playing field for individual investors.

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