Bull markets are born on pessimism, grown on skepticism, mature on optimism and die on euphoria. The time of maximum pessimism is the best time to buy, and the time of maximum optimism is the best time to sell.
Buy when everyone else is selling and hold until everyone else is buying. That's not just a catchy slogan. It's the very essence of successful investing.
I believe the very best money is made at the market turns. Everyone says you get killed trying to pick tops and bottoms and you make all your money by playing the trend in the middle. Well for twelve years I have been missing the meat in the middle but I have made a lot of money at tops and bottoms.
It is far more difficult... to know when to sell a stock than when to buy.
In the financial markets I find it easy to predict what will happen and very difficult to predict when it will happen. I think that things were clear during the bubble as to what would happen eventually.
Never try to sell at the top. It isn't wise. Sell after a reaction if there is no rally.
I can't recall ever once having seen the name of a market timer on Forbes' annual list of the richest people in the world. If it were truly possible to predict corrections, you'd think somebody would have made billions by doing it.
The idea is to buy when the probability is greatest that the market is going to advance.
Buy low and sell high. It's pretty simple. The problem is knowing what's low and what's high.
Of course if you happen to time the market really well, you can make more money with some of these smaller companies, but for someone with no exposure I wouldn't want to take the risk that they timed it wrong.
I made a fortune getting out too soon.
Now is always the hardest time to invest.
Investments are like trains, and if you miss one, don’t worry because another one will come down the line.
"If I buy stocks on Smith's tip I must sell those same stocks on Smith's tip. I am depending on him. Suppose Smith is away on a holiday when the selling time comes around?
You have to understand what market history looks like. What market history tells you is that the very, very best investments are made when things look the worst.
Whenever the investor sold out in an upswing as soon as the top level of the previous well-recognized bull market was reached, he had a chance in the next bear market to buy back at one third (or better) below his selling price.
It would be wonderful if we could avoid the setbacks with timely exits, but nobody has figured out how to predict them.
Sometimes my mistake has been hesitancy about acting on the decisions I've made. When's the best time to invest? It's today, not tomorrow.
A businessman is someone who buys at ten and is happy to get out at twelve. The other kind of man buys at ten, sees it rise to eighteen and does nothing. He is waiting for it to rise to twenty. When it drops to two he waits for it to get back to ten.
One of the most helpful things that any body can learn is to give up trying to catch the last eighth - or the first. These two are the most expensive eighths in the world.
The idea that a bell rings to signal when investors should get into or out of the stock market is simply not credible. After nearly fifty years in this business, I do not know of anybody who has done it successfully and consistently. I don't even know anybody who knows anybody who has done it successfully and consistently. Yet market timing appears to be increasingly embraced by mutual fund investors and the professional managers of fund portfolios alike.
