Steve Ballmer Quotes

People always come up to me and ask what the next 'big short' will be. The truth is I simply do not have an answer, and do not want to have an answer, to this question.

There's one thing I've learned about entrepreneurs' business plans. Every one is wrong.

Markets are frequently ahead of, and often out of sync with, the economy.

There are a lot of parallels between being a mutual fund manager and being a general manager. Both in the financial markets and in baseball, we're dealing with a world where uncertainty reigns. We're trying to predict the future performance of human beings. It's a fundamental difficulty for which we both have to account.

It would be wonderful if we could avoid the setbacks with timely exits, but nobody has figured out how to predict them.

We do not have, nor have had, and never will have an opinion about where the stock market, interest rates, or business activity will be a year from now.

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.

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

How do Ferrari know what I'm doing next year when I don't know what I'm doing next week?

Business is all about risk taking and managing uncertainties and turbulence.

I have almost no interest in quarterly reports. Running a business or investing in a business based on quarterly earnings doesn't make any sense at all to me.

The only thing I would say is, I think there's a lot of future value in Blackberry, but without experienced people who have run this type of business, and without a strategic plan, it would be really challenging.

The key to making acquisitions is being ready because you really never know when the right big one is going to come along.

The global financial crisis - missed by most analysts - shows that most forecasters are poor at pricing in economic/financial risks, let alone geopolitical ones.

The nature of the global business environment guarantees that no matter how hard we work to create a stable and healthy organisation, our organisation will continue to experience dramatic changes far beyond our control.

No one has any idea what's next... the uncertainty of the business climate in America is frightening, frightening to everybody, and it's delaying the recovery.

How else can I manage, if I don't know what's going on out there?

It’s very difficult to find out what’s going on in the economy even when its happening.

I can never predict what the markets will do. Sometimes it does the exact opposite of what I would have expected.

Whether we vote to leave or remain, there are risks to our future; there are challenges in the global economy.

There are economic risks if we leave, economic risks if we remain.

Dealing with uncertainty is always a key challenge for investors. But dealing with uncertainty doesn't mean avoiding it - on the contrary, it is often fuzziness about a company's future that creates the type of opportunity bargain-hunting investors cherish.

I'm a very commonsense guy - I just look at the viability of the idea, if I feel the team has the ability to execute the idea. I also look at the investment syndicate, the size of the market, and then a lot of gut married on top of it.

I don't know how this industry works. There is no formula.

Just because a company's future is highly uncertain doesn't mean an investment in it is risky. In fact, some of the best potential investments are highly uncertain but have little risk of permanent capital loss.