Market Timing

“Most of the people who have accumulated the greatest wealth in this business have done so not by predicting the future, but by buying companies at such attractive prices, thereby discounting the majority of the problems people fear.”

“It is more important to know what will happen than when it will happen, because it is impossible to forecast with precision the timing of critical events.”

“I am skeptical about stock market forecasting by anybody, and particularly by bankers.”

“The trouble with market forecasting is not that it is done by unintelligent and unskillful people. Quite to the contrary, the trouble is that it is done by so many really expert people that their efforts constantly neutralize each other, and end up almost exactly in zero.”

“If we really knew what the future will bring that is all we would have to know; but since stock market people can only guess the future and since they have the embarrassing habit of guessing wrongly, it seems best not to lay too much stress upon forecasts.”

“I am an exponent of the philosophy that the main objective of common stock investment should be pricing, not timing; and by pricing I mean the endeavor to buy securities at prices which are attractive, letting timing take care of itself.”

“It is a safe prediction for me to make that, in future years as in the past, common stocks will advance too far and decline too far, and that investors, like speculators — and institutions, like individuals — will have their periods of enchantment and disenchantment with equities.”

“No prediction — whether of a repetition of past patterns or of a complete break with past patterns — can be proved in advance to be right.”

“Economic events rarely unfold in the way stock-market people forecast them.”

“My experience leads me to predict that the action of the market will govern the investor’s choice as to probable future growth rates, rather than vice-versa.”

“No one, not even the most experienced trader, economist or businessman can predict with certainty the course of the stock market.”

“Using the outlook for the economy to predict the direction of the stock market, which most appear to do, has it exactly backward. The stock market’s behavior will predict the economy’s future behavior.”

“As long-term investors, we position portfolios for the 95% of the time the economy is growing, not the unforecastable 5% when it is not.”

“I think that most individual investors make great mistakes when they try and time the market, and try and think about what’s the best stock to buy now.”

“Valuation is determined by the relation between a stock price and the present value of the free cash the business will generate over one’s forecast time horizon. The problem comes with assessing the future free cash flow. It is a highly subjective and uncertain exercise.”

“There is very little value added trying to predict where the market is going or guessing whether it’s overpriced or underpriced.”

“I figure that I want to swim as well as I can against the tides. I’m not trying to predict the tides.”

“Momentum crashes are fast, violent, and predictable in hindsight.”

“Market timing is hard — but ignoring valuations is harder.”

“The underlying driving force behind market timing decisions seems to be emotional — fear, greed, chasing performance — buying something after it has gone up, disappointment, and sales after something has declined.”

“The principle of “managed” investment trusts is absolutely sound, granted only one premise. The premise is that there are somewhere people of such experience and insight that they can predict with some sort of accuracy the future behavior of securities.”

“It is not forecasts that protect capital, but structure.”

“I don’t believe all this nonsense about market timing. Just buy very good value and when the market is ready that value will be recognized.”

“I believe it’s hard to predict the future. It’s not that hard to predict the present. In other words, it’s not that hard to understand what’s going on today.”

“Extrapolation is usually right, but not valuable, and predictions of deviation from trends are potentially profitable but rarely right. So far, macro-economic forecasting doesn’t represent the path to superior investments.”

“Being “right” doesn’t lead to superior performance if the consensus forecast is also right.”

“Most of us have roughly the same ability to predict the future. The trouble is, being right as often as the average forecaster won’t produce superior results.”

“Extreme predictions are rarely right, but they’re the ones that make you big money.”

“Potentially profitable, nonconsensus forecasts are very hard to believe in and act on for the simple reason that they are so far from conventional wisdom.”

“Valuation tells you what to buy; psychology tells you when to buy it.”

“Valuation is a terrible timing tool and a wonderful return predictor.”

“Forecasting is useful only if it reminds you of your ignorance.”

“One can predict the course of a comet more easily than one can predict the course of Citigroup’s stock. The attractiveness, of course, is that you can make more money successfully predicting a stock than you can a comet.”

“We deceive ourselves when we believe that past stock market return patterns provide the bounds by which we can predict the future.”

“Forecasting is a notoriously underpaid profession, and extremely risky to boot, so I avoid it.”

“There will be bear markets about twice every 10 years and recessions about twice every 10 or 12 years but nobody has been able to predict them reliably. So the best thing to do is to buy when shares are thoroughly depressed and that means when other people are selling.”

“The influence on stock prices are so numerous and so complex that no person has ever been able to predict the trend of stock prices with consistent success.”

“A lifetime of investment research has taught me to become more and more humble about making predictions.”

“The investor’s edge is not forecasting, but endurance”

“Attempting to guess short-term swings in individual stocks, the stock market or the economy is not likely to produce consistently good results. Short-term developments are too unpredictable.”

“We don’t need to predict the future — we need to prepare for it.”

“Consistency of process matters more than precision of forecasts.”

“We don’t pay attention to quarterly earnings or consensus forecasts. That’s performance investing, not value investing.”

“Superior returns come from better expectations, not better forecasts.”

“Paradigm shifts are an inevitable result of forecast errors — the raw material from which paradigm shifts are fashioned.”

“Even the most serious efforts to make predictions can end up so far from the mark as to be more dangerous than useless.”

“You can’t forecast multiples.”

“Most human error is predictable”

“You never can predict the economy. You can’t predict the stock market.”

“I deal in facts, not forecasting the future.”

“The only problem with market timing is getting the timing right.”

“If timing the market is such a great strategy, why haven’t we seen the names of any market timers at the top of the Forbes list of richest Americans?”

“Corrections are unpredictable. By selling stocks to avoid pain, you can miss the next gain.”

“Every recession brings out the skeptics who doubt that we will ever come out of it, and who predict that we will soon fall into a depression, when new cars will sit unsold in the showrooms forever and houses will stand empty, and the country will go bankrupt.”

“There are economic facts and there’s economic predictions and economic predictions are a total waste.”

“No one can predict with any certainty which way the next 1,000 points will be. Market fluctuations, while no means comfortable, are normal.”

“I didn’t spend any time predicting the economy, or the stock market. I spent all my time looking at companies.”

“So the stock market will definitely have a correction. Everybody will say that it is the end of the world. I predict it. They will say the big one’s coming.”

“I’ve been fully invested at the start of all the major declines and I will be fully invested in the next one. I am not a market predictor, that’s for darn sure.”

“Market timing is speculating and it rarely, if ever, pays off.”

“Even in good markets we have declines and trying to predict its direction over the near term is an exercise in futility.”

“It would be very useful to know what the market is going to do. But unfortunately, of all the market corrections that have ever come, no one has been able to predict them.”

“The stock market has a 100% record, in the last 50 years, of predicting upturns in the economy. It’s never been wrong. It’s less than 50-50 on a downturn.”

“It’s extremely difficult to figure out when to sell anything. So I’d rather have the stock taken away from me in a merger or a buyout. It’s much easier.”

“One point movements may be likened to the ripples of the stock market, whose occurrence may be influenced by so great a multitude of factors that it is impossible to forecast them. Ten-point movements may perhaps be compared to waves.”

“The general state of business thus does not forecast the course of stock prices except in the apparently paradoxical fashion that great prosperity affords an advantageous time for selling stocks, extreme business depression an opportunity for purchase.”

“It is usually a much simpler matter to forecast a bull market than to call the turn at its end.”

“If we use prediction as the measure of a model, traditional finance makes precisely wrong predictions.”

“The stock market itself seems to be mainly driven by fashions and fads. However, when you look at individual stocks, it’s a different story, because individual stocks are much more diverse, and some of them can be predicted to perform well over the long run.”

“Internal rates of return and other mathematical formulas for real estate projections attempt to legitimize the presumption of predictable results.”

“In my opinion, the market tells you when to buy things. And when things are really cheap, on a Graham and Dodd valuation basis, you should like them more. And when they’re really expensive, you should like them less.”

“The prevailing view has been that the market will earn a high rate of return if the holding period is long enough, but entry point is what really matters.”

“It is crucial to have a strategy in place before problems hit, precisely because no one can accurately predict the future direction of the stock market or economy.”

“In my view, predicting future private market value is like predicting future Dow Jones levels: It doesn’t make any sense at all.”

“So many investors today focus on earnings, but I focus on assets and don’t try to predict next months’ earnings, which is a much more difficult approach to investing.”

“The problem in investing, I think, is timing. You may be right. But in the long run, we’re all dead. Even if you’re right, if it takes 20 years to work out, it can be a disaster.”

“I make no attempt to forecast the general market — my efforts are devoted to finding undervalued securities.”

“Forecasts usually tell us more about the forecaster than of the future.”

“The fact that people will be full of greed, fear, or folly is predictable. The sequence is not predictable.”

“I am certainly not going to predict what general business or the stock market are going to do in the next year or two since I don’t have the faintest idea.”