Inspirational Quotations

Inspirational Quotes by Morgan Housel (American Financial Journalist, Investor)

Morgan Housel is an award-winning American economics- and financial-journalist, as well as an investor. He is a partner at The Collaborative Fund, a New York City-based venture capital firm.

Housel is a former columnist at The Motley Fool and The Wall Street Journal. His writing on finance and investing is distinguished for the many insights he draws from psychology, history, neurology, and sociology to highlight the cognitive biases that instigate investors to become their own worst intellectual enemies.

Housel’s works include Everyone Believes It, Most Will Be Wrong (2011) and 50 Years in the Making: The Great Recession and Its Aftermath (2012.) His writings have been featured in the anthology The Best Investment Writing (2017.)

More: Website READ: Works by Morgan Housel

You are under no obligation to read or watch financial news. If you do, you are under no obligation to take any of it seriously.
Morgan Housel

Companies that focus on their stock price will eventually lose their customers. Companies that focus on their customers will eventually boost their stock price. This is simple, but forgotten by countless managers.
Morgan Housel

You can control your portfolio allocation, your own education, who you listen to, what you read, what evidence you pay attention to, and how you respond to certain events. You cannot control what the Fed does, laws Congress sets, the next jobs report, or whether a company will beat earnings estimates. Focus on the former; try to ignore the latter.
Morgan Housel

There is a strong correlation between knowledge and humility. The best investors realize how little they know.
Morgan Housel

Investors want to believe in someone. Forecasters want to earn a living. One of those groups is going to be disappointed. I think you know which.
Morgan Housel

In 1989, the CEOs of the seven largest U.S. banks earned an average of 100 times what a typical household made. By 2007, more than 500 times. By 2008, several of those banks no longer existed.
Morgan Housel

Several studies have shown that people prefer a pundit who is confident to one who is accurate. Pundits are happy to oblige.
Morgan Housel

Study successful investors, and you’ll notice a common denominator: they are masters of psychology. They can’t control the market, but they have complete control over the gray matter between their ears.
Morgan Housel

Investment bank Dresdner Kleinwort looked at analysts’ predictions of interest rates, and compared that with what interest rates actually did in hindsight. It found an almost perfect lag. “Analysts are terribly good at telling us what has just happened but of little use in telling us what is going to happen in the future,” the bank wrote. It’s common to confuse the rearview mirror for the windshield.
Morgan Housel

Do nothing are the two most powerful—and underused—words in investing. The urge to act has transferred an inconceivable amount of wealth from investors to brokers.
Morgan Housel

Strong political beliefs in either direction limit your ability to make rational decisions more than almost anything else.
Morgan Housel

Our memories of financial history seem to extend about a decade back. “Time heals all wounds,” the saying goes. It also erases many important lessons.
Morgan Housel

As Nate Silver writes, “When a possibility is unfamiliar to us, we do not even think about it.” The biggest risk is always something that no one is talking about, thinking about, or preparing for. That’s what makes it risky.
Morgan Housel

No one on the Forbes 400 list of richest Americans can be described as a “perma-bear.” A natural sense of optimism not only healthy, but vital.
Morgan Housel

Having more than you need can be a liability masquerading as an advantage, and no sense of “enough” can look like ambition but often leads you over the edge.
Morgan Housel

Billionaire investor Ray Dalio once said, “The more you think you know, the more closed-minded you’ll be.” Repeat this line to yourself the next time you’re certain of something.
Morgan Housel

Dean Williams once noted that “Expertise is great, but it has a bad side effect: It tends to create the inability to accept new ideas.” Some of the world’s best investors have no formal backgrounds in finance—which helps them tremendously.
Morgan Housel

A money manager’s amount of experience doesn’t tell you much. You can underperform the market for an entire career. Many have.
Morgan Housel

Short-term thinking is at the root of most of our problems, whether it’s in business, politics, investing, or work.
Morgan Housel

Finance would be better if it was taught by the psychology and history departments at universities.
Morgan Housel

When most people say they want to be a millionaire, what they really mean is “I want to spend $1 million,” which is literally the opposite of being a millionaire.
Morgan Housel

Focus on not getting beat by the market before you think about trying to beat it.
Morgan Housel

The best company in the world run by the smartest management can be a terrible investment if purchased at the wrong price.
Morgan Housel

How long you stay invested for will likely be the single most important factor determining how well you do at investing.
Morgan Housel

Several academic studies have shown that those who trade the most earn the lowest returns. Remember Pascal’s wisdom: “All man’s miseries derive from not being able to sit in a quiet room alone.”
Morgan Housel

When you think you have a great idea, go out of your way to talk with someone who disagrees with it. At worst, you continue to disagree with them. More often, you’ll gain valuable perspective. Fight confirmation bias like the plague.
Morgan Housel

Change is as rapid as it is unpredictable.
Morgan Housel

Try to learn as many investing mistakes as possible vicariously through others. Other people have made every mistake in the book. You can learn more from studying the investing failures than the investing greats.
Morgan Housel

Blogger Jesse Livermore writes,”Most people, whether bull or bear, when they are right, are right for the wrong reason, in my opinion.”
Morgan Housel

Two things make an economy grow: population growth and productivity growth. Everything else is a function of one of those two drivers.
Morgan Housel

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