Top 44 Quotes & Sayings by Stanley Druckenmiller

I believe that good investors are successful not because of their IQ, but because they have an investing discipline. But, what is more disciplined than a machine? A well-researched machine can make many average investors redundant, leaving behind only the really good human investors with exceptional intuition and skill.

If you're running a business for the long term, the last thing you should be doing is borrowing money to buy back stock.

I don't put Tesla in the Amazon category. They have not proved to me that, as a financial model and an economic model, it is going to work.

There's just nothing to me so invaluable in my business, but in many businesses, as great mentors.

I don't really like hedging. To me, if something needs to be hedged, you shouldn't have a position in it.

Soros has taught me that when you have tremendous conviction on a trade, you have to go for the jugular. It takes courage to be a pig. It takes courage to ride a profit with huge leverage.

Carried interest... you're making money on somebody else's capital. It's not on your own. If that's not income, I don't know what is.

All in all, I don't think robots and greater automation can bring about a utopian world as I imagined it would as a kid 50 years ago.

Good debt growth is when you borrow money, and it goes into the real economy. You do capital spending. You build businesses.

I like putting all my eggs in one basket and then watching the basket very carefully.

If you're early on in your career and they give you a choice between a great mentor or higher pay, take the mentor every time. It's not even close. And don't even think about leaving that mentor until your learning curve peaks.

Earnings don't move the overall market; it's the Federal Reserve Board... focus on the central banks, and focus on the movement of liquidity... most people in the market are looking for earnings and conventional measures. It's liquidity that moves markets.

I've always loved to play games, and face it: investing is one big game. You need to be decisive, open-minded, flexible and competitive.

For 30 years I've been responsible for managing client money, and it's been a joy, but at some point I need to move on. Thirty years is enough.

Once an economy reaches a certain level of acceleration... the Fed is no longer with you... The Fed, instead of trying to get the economy moving, reverts to acting like the central bankers they are and starts worrying about inflation and things getting too hot.

With my business, the way you make big money is you find a great management team and a good concept, and you stick to it, and you add to it over time. In philanthropy, there was more this idea that once an idea was formulated, you moved along.

I don't like the repeal of the estate tax.

I think old people like Hillary Clinton and I shouldn't try and be cool with social networks, you know; maybe she should leave that stuff up to Chelsea.

I think ageing demographics is a bigger issue in China than people think. And the problems it creates should be become evident as early as 2016.

I have given myself a Tesla for my 60th birthday.

You can be far more aggressive when you're making good profits.

In my experience, the more successful an idea is, the easier it is to fund it. In philanthropy, it's almost harder.

Soros is the best loss taker I've ever seen. He doesn't care whether he wins or loses on a trade. If a trade doesn't work, he's confident enough about his ability to win on other trades that he can easily walk away from the position.

I think Bezos is incredible.

Bitcoin is like anything else: it's worth what people are willing to pay for it.

The way you create deflation is you create an asset bubble.

If machines do everything well, including allocating capital and resources efficiently, can that be deflationary, can that eliminate poverty? I don't know. It's hard to be very optimistic if you look at how humans have behaved historically.

Every serious deflation I've looked at is preceded by an asset bubble, and then it bursts.

I love Amazon.

What a company's been earning doesn't mean anything. What you have to look at is what people think it's going to earn. If you can see something in two years is going to be entirely different than the conventional wisdom, that's how you make money.

If you're extremely confident, taking a loss doesn't bother you.

The first thing I heard when I got in the business - not from my mentor - was, 'Bulls make money, bears make money, and pigs get slaughtered.' I'm here to tell you I was a pig. And I strongly believe the only way to make long-term returns in our business that are superior is by being a pig.

Whenever I see a stock market explode, six to 12 months later you are in a full blown recovery.

Part of my advantage is that my strength is economic forecasting, but that only works in free markets, when markets are smarter than people. That's how I started. I watched the stock market, how equities reacted to change in levels of economic activity, and I could understand how price signals worked and how to forecast them.

The few times that Soros has ever criticized me was when I was really right on a market and didn't maximize the opportunity.

I love being around kids. I couldn't figure out why all these 70-year-olds wanted to hang out with me when I was 27. Now I understand, and I'm trying to steal their energy from them like they stole from me at the time.

I don't think Donald Trump is Ronald Reagan.

Soros is the best loss taker I've ever seen. He doesn't care whether he wins or loses on a trade. If a trade doesn't work, he's confident enough about his ability to win on other trades. There are a lot of shoes on the shelf; wear only the ones that fit. If you're extremely confident, taking a loss doesn't bother you.

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.

The way to build superior long-term returns is through preservation of capital and home runs...When you have tremendous conviction on a trade, you have to go for the jugular. It takes courage to be a pig.

I particularly remember the time I gave (the research director) my paper on the banking industry. I felt very proud of my work. However, he read through it and said, 'This is useless. What makes the stock go up and down?' That comment acted as a spur. Thereafter, I focused my analysis on seeking to identify the factors that were strongly correlated to a stock's price movement as opposed to looking at all the fundamentals. Frankly, even today, many analysts still don't know what makes their particular stocks go up and down.

Once you make a lot of money, it's incredibly enjoyable to give it away. It's a way to satisfy the soul.

The way to build long-term returns is through preservation of capital and home runs.

Everyone sort of lives with their rulers in the past and doesn’t look at coming changes.