A Quote by William J. Bernstein

It's bad enough that you have to take market risk. Only a fool takes on the additional risk of doing yet more damage by failing to diversify properly with his or her nest egg. Avoid the problem-buy a well-run index fund and own the whole market.

William J. Bernstein

Quote Topics

Additional Avoid Bad Buy Damage Diversify Doing Egg Enough Failing Fool Fund Her His Market Market Risk More Nest Nest Egg Only Own Problem Properly Risk Run Take Takes Well Whole

Quote Author

William J. Bernstein
Born: 1954

Index funds eliminate the risks of individual stocks, market sectors, and manager selection. Only stock market risk remains.

John C. Bogle

The risk of working with people you don't respect; the risk of working for a company whose values are incosistent with your own; the risk of compromising what's important; the risk of doing something that fails to express-or even contradicts--who you are. And then there is the most dangerous risk of all--the risk of spending your life not doing what you want on the bet that you can buy yourself the freedom to do it later.

Randy Komisar

Experience conclusively shows that index-fund buyers are likely to obtain results exceeding those of the typical fund manager, whose large advisory fees and substantial portfolio turnover tend to reduce investment yields. Many people will find the guarantee of playing the stock-market game at par every round a very attractive one. The index fund is a sensible, serviceable method for obtaining the market's rate of return with absolutely no effort and minimal expense.

Burton Malkiel

An index fund is a fund that simply invests in all of the stocks in a market. So, for example, an index fund might invest in every single stock or almost every single stock in the U.S. market, it might invest in every single stock abroad, or it might invest in all of the bonds that are out there. And you can make a perfectly fine investing portfolio that mixes equal parts of all three of those.

William J. Bernstein

Still, I figure we shouldn't' discourage fans of actively managed funds. With all their buying and selling, active investors ensure the market is reasonably efficient. That makes it possible for the rest of us to do the sensible thing, which is to index. Want to join me in this parasitic behavior? To build a well-diversified portfolio, you might stash 70 percent of your stock portfolio into a Wilshire 5000-index fund and the remaining 30 percent in an international-index fund.

Paul Samuelson

It’s all risk. And if it isn’t, it needs to be. The real trick is to find the risk that is right for you, a risk that doesn’t take you so far out of your own identity that it’s not a you that you recognize who’s doing the writing.

Jim Krusoe

To laugh is to risk appearing a fool. To weep is to risk appearing sentimental. To reach out to another is to risk involvement. To expose feelings is to risk exposing your true self. To place your ideas and dreams before a crowd is to risk their loss. To love is to risk not being loved in return. To hope is to risk pain. To try is to risk failure. But risks must be taken, because the greatest hazard in life is to risk nothing.

William Arthur Ward

Unfortunately, tools that transfer risk can also increase systemic risk if major counterparties fail to manage their own risk exposures properly.

Blythe Masters

When you buy enough stocks to give you control of a target company, that's called mergers and acquisitions or corporate raiding. Hedge funds have been doing this, as well as corporate financial managers. With borrowed money you can take over or raid a foreign company too. So, you're having a monopolistic consolidation process that's pushed up the market, because in order to buy a company or arrange a merger, you have to offer more than the going stock-market price. You have to convince existing holders of a stock to sell out to you by paying them more than they'd otherwise get.

Michael Hudson

The technical explanation is that the market-sensitive risk models used by thousands of market participants work on the assumption that each user is the only person using them.

Avinash Persaud

I spent my whole career thinking about risk, markets, infrastructure, and regulation. I had seen the financial crisis unfold, and I had seen the credit derivatives market get operationally ahead of itself, which resulted in systemic risk counterparty exposures. I began to believe that distributed ledgers had the capability to tackle that problem.

Blythe Masters

Life is inherently risky. There is only one big risk you should avoid at all costs, and that is the risk of doing nothing.

Denis Waitley

Of course if you happen to time the market really well, you can make more money with some of these smaller companies, but for someone with no exposure I wouldn't want to take the risk that they timed it wrong.

Peter Schiff

The more evident it is that a certain company is going to become the market leader in a big market space, then the higher the valuation goes because the risk has been dramatically reduced.

Audrey MacLean

Just as a moral distinction is drawn between "those at risk" and "those posing a risk", health education routinely draws a distinction between the harm caused by external causes out of the individual's control and that caused by oneself. Lifestyle risk discourse overturns the notion that health hazards in postindustrial society are out of the individual's control. On the contrary, the dominant theme of lifestyle risk discourse is the responsibility of the individual to avoid health risks for the sake of his or her own health as well as the greater good of society.