Investment Horizon Quotes

We talk about long-term patient investing, and that idea that slow and steady does win the race, that time can be your best friend when it comes to investing. That's why we have a turtle as a logo at Ariel.

If you are not willing to own a stock for 10 years, do not even think about owning it for 10 minutes.

There's such a preoccupation with liquidity and such an unwillingness to invest beyond the horizon of the next quarter and making sure that the CEOs hit their quarterly earnings.

The dominance of short-term perspectives has led to routine decisions in the markets that sacrifice the long-term buildup of genuine value in pursuit of artificial, short-term gains.

It all comes down to interest rates. As an investor, all you're doing is putting up a lump-sump payment for a future cash flow.

I do tend to think that things that have incredibly long time horizons often do involve market failures.

My advice to the average investor in 1988 is to be patient and think long-term. It will take 18 months for confidence to get better and, in the meantime, this is absolutely no place for short-term money.

Over the long term, it's hard for a stock to earn a much better return that the business which underlies it earns. If the business earns six percent on capital over forty years and you hold it for that forty years, you're not going to make much different than a six percent return - even if you originally buy it at a huge discount. Conversely, if a business earns eighteen percent on capital over twenty or thirty years, even if you pay an expensive looking price, you'll end up with one hell of a result.

I'm a big believer in investing for the long term, and the decisions you make shouldn't be made if the economy is good or bad at a specific time.

If everything you do needs to work on a three-year time horizon, then you’re competing against a lot of people, But if you’re willing to invest on a seven-year time horizon, you’re now competing against a fraction of those people, because very few companies are willing to do that. Just by lengthening the time horizon, you can engage in endeavours that you could never otherwise pursue. At Amazon we like things to work in five to seven years. We’re willing to plant seeds, let them grow—and we’re very stubborn. We say we’re stubborn on vision and flexible on details.

My positioning with my investors was always, I need three to five years.

It is important for investors to understand what they do and don't know. Learn to recognize that you cannot possibly know what is going to happen in the future, and any investment plan that is dependent on accurately forecasting where markets will be next year is doomed to failure.

When we look at our business, we are not that concerned about short term valuations.

In the short run, the market is a voting machine, but in the long run it is a weighing machine.

If, when making a stock investment, you're not considering holding it at least ten years, don't waste more than ten minutes considering it.

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.

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

Of course, the discounting of future earnings should hurt all stocks. But it should hurt technology stocks more than others, because so many of them are valued at extremely high levels relative to their current earnings.

Well, there's always risk in long-term investment.

Investment based on genuine long-term expectations is so difficult today as to be scarcely practicable.

It's critical to have a disciplined investing approach and stick with it.

Stocks are a safe bet, but only if you stay invested long enough to ride out the corrections.

Only buy something that you'd be perfectly happy to hold if the market shut down for 10 years.

Venture capitalists are professional money managers. We are provided capital to invest as long as we can return it to our investors with a strong return in a reasonable amount of time. A strong return is three times cash on cash. A reasonable amount of time is ten years max.

The average mutual fund holding period for equity or fixed income is only about three years. It's too short.