Portfolio Performance Quotes

I’ve learned many things from him [George Soros], but perhaps the most significant is that it’s not whether you’re right or wrong that’s important, but how much money you make when you’re right and how much you lose when you’re wrong.

Well, actually, I manage a couple of stock portfolios or funds or whatever you want to call 'em, and I think I've done relatively well with them.

There's something we calculate called an alpha, and that's the stock's return that's independent, uncorrelated to the market. And the only way you really get a high alpha is for something to zig when the market zags.

Returns matter a lot. It's our capital.

Mutual funds dare to be average. In fact, they dare to be lousy. They have long since ceased striving for anything resembling perfection when it comes to managing your money.

The debate can be put in the form of the question: Resolved, that the best of money managers cannot be demonstrated to be able to deliver the goods of superior portfolio-selection performance. Any jury that reviews the evidence, and there is a great deal of relevant evidence, must at least come out with the Scottish verdict: Superior investment performance is unproved.

Whether a tops-down or bottoms-up investor in bonds, stocks, or private equity, the standard analysis tends to judge an investor or his firm on the basis of how the bullish or bearish aspects of the cycle were managed.

I think it is crucial to diversify one's portfolio.

Owning equities is an essential part of anyone's portfolio. You just can't ignore it over time. It's going to add the real pop to anyone's overall performance.

We believe that people moving their portfolios to an overweight in bonds will be disappointed over the long-term and will significantly underperform an asset allocation that over-weights equities.

Having different types of stocks in your portfolio can enhance returns.

I think I pick more winners than losers.

People would be a lot more skeptical if they understood that there is an incredible amount of chance in the results that you observe for active managers. So the distribution of outcomes is enormously wide - but that's exactly what you'd expect by chance with lots of active managers who hold imperfectly diversified portfolios. The really good portfolios contain a lot of really lucky picks, and the really bad portfolios contain a lot of really unlucky picks as well as some really bad ones.

The biggest secret in venture capital is that the best investment in a successful fund equals or outperforms the entire rest of the fund combined.

The one stock in my portfolio which I say hasn't worked yet but has the potential for a big home run is General Motors.

Fund investors are confident that they can easily select superior fund managers. They are wrong.

There is one thing of which I can assure you. If good performance of the fund is even a minor objective, any portfolio encompassing one hundred stocks (whether the manager is handling one thousand dollars or one billion dollars) is not being operated logically. The addition of the one hundredth stock simply can't reduce the potential variance in portfolio performance sufficiently to compensate for the negative effect its inclusion has on the overall portfolio expectation.