David Swensen

“The investor is bombarded with staggering amounts of information, staggering amounts of stimuli that are designed to get the investor to buy and sell and trade, to do exactly the wrong thing, to create excessive profits for these intermediaries that aren’t acting in the investor’s best interests.”

“If you’re investing with a long time horizon, having an equity bias makes sense; stocks go up in the long run.”

“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 opportunity’s greatest where assets are least efficiently priced.”

“If you talk to a businessman, a businessman is going to feed the winners and kill the losers. But in the investment world, when you’ve got a winner you should be suspicious about what’s next. And if you’ve got a loser, you should be hopeful — although not naively hopeful.”

“The mutual fund industry is not an investment management industry. It’s a marketing industry.”

“With a casual attempt to beat the market, you’re going to fail.”

“I’m looking for somebody that’s got a screw loose and they define winning not by being as rich as they can be individually, but by producing great investment returns.”