A Quote by Ben Stein

Traders can cause short-term volatility. In the long run, the market must revert to a sensible price/earnings multiple.

Ben Stein

Quote Topics

Cause Earnings Long Long Run Market Multiple Must Price Revert Run Sensible Short Short-Term Term Traders Volatility

Quote Author

Ben Stein
American - Actor
Born: November 25, 1944

Being captive to quarterly earnings isn't consistent with long-term value creation. This pressure and the short term focus of equity markets make it difficult for a public company to invest for long-term success, and tend to force company leaders to sacrifice long-term results to protect current earnings.

Charles Koch

The most important thing that a company can do in the midst of this economic turmoil is to not lose sight of the long-term perspective. Don't confuse the short-term crises with the long-term trends. Amidst all of these short-term change are some fundamental structural transformations happening in the economy, and the best way to stay in business is to not allow the short-term distractions to cause you to ignore what is happening in the long term.

Paul Saffo

It doesn't matter whether the market is up or down. All the day traders want is volatility.

Omar Amanat

Frequent comparative ranking can only reinforce a short-term investment perspective. It is understandably difficult to maintain a long-term view when, faced with the penalties for poor short-term performance, the long-term view may well be from the unemployment line ... Relative-performance-oriented investors really act as speculators. Rather than making sensible judgments about the attractiveness of specific stocks and bonds, they try to guess what others are going to do and then do it first.

Seth Klarman

When a long-term trend loses it’s momentum, short-term volatility tends to rise. It is easy to see why that should be so: the trend-following crowd is disoriented.

George Soros

The price earning multiple must be less than ten or the inverse of the long term corporate bond rate, whichever is the less.

Peter Cundill

What we're going to do is redouble our efforts on financial regulatory reform, because that has in it sensible things like say on pay, so at least the shareholders are minding the store, sensible things like saying, for heaven's sakes, compensation should be focused on - on long term, so that you don't have rewards for short-term risk-taking.

Christina Romer

In most cases the favorable price performance will be accompanied by a well-defined improvement in the average earnings, in the dividend, and in the balance-sheet position. Thus in the long run the market test and the ordinary business test of a successful equity commitment tend to be largely identical.

Benjamin Graham

If we're concerned about volatility of earnings because we want some more stability in our lives, then let's create, instead of an unemployment insurance system, an earnings insurance system that will moderate the volatility for a certain period of time until we get back on our feet.

Robert Reich

The big picture is: the main thing you should be concerned about in the future are incremental returns on capital going forward. As it turns out, past history of a good return on capital is a good proxy for this but obviously not foolproof. I think this is an area where thoughtful analysis can add value to any simple ranking/screening strategy such as the magic formula. When doing in depth analysis of companies, I care very much about long term earnings power, not necessarily so much about the volatility of that earnings power but about my certainty of "normal" earnings power over time.

Joel Greenblatt

The failure to work out sensible budgets makes it impossible for government agencies to make long-term plans, and instead leaves them scrambling to spend money in the short term.

Matt Taibbi

In the short-run, the market is a voting machine - reflecting a voter-registration test that requires only money, not intelligence or emotional stability - but in the long- run, the market is a weighing machine.

Benjamin Graham

I buy stocks when they are battered. I am strict with my discipline. I always buy stocks with low price-earnings ratios, low price-to-book value ratios and higher-than-average yield. Academic studies have shown that a strategy of buying out-of-favor stocks with low P/E, price-to-book and price-to-cash flow ratios outperforms the market pretty consistently over long periods of time.

David Dreman

Short-term market and economic prognostication is largely a fool’s errand, we invest according to a strategy that makes the need to rely on short-term market or economic assessments largely irrelevant.