Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
From 1983 to 2000, William Goren stole more than $30 million from investors on Long Island and in Queens. His favorite targets were widows and retired couples, like Helga and Simon Novack, Holocaust survivors who gave Mr. Goren their life savings.
I feel many responsibilities - to our customers, to our employees, to the environment, to the world at large. But I don't want to feel responsible to investors, to outsiders with financial concerns that may differ from those of the welfare of IKEA.
Of course, looking tough on inflation is part of any central banker's job description: if investors believe that inflation is going to get out of control, you end up with higher interest rates and capital flight, and a vicious circle quickly ensues.
Commissions add up, taxes are a big drag, margin ain't cheap. A good accountant costs money as well. The math on this one is obvious, yet investors often fail to recognize it: Keep your costs low and your turnover lower, and you will win in the end.
In a Ponzi scheme, a promoter pays back his initial investors with money he has raised from new investors. Eventually, the promoter can no longer find enough new investors to pay off the people who have already put up money, and the scheme collapses.
Bootstrapping allows you total creative freedom. For example, if you decide to approach your business in a certain way that makes it a two- or three-year process to get to your first product, you can do that, versus being rushed into it by investors.
For decades, activist shareholders were an entertaining, but largely ignored, Wall Street sideshow. Disgruntled investors would attend annual meetings to harangue executives, criticize strategies - and protest that their complaints were being ignored.
To investors, job creation is a second-order effect. Market participants care first about interest rates, exchange rates, bond prices and the one great factor that affects all three: the long-term solvency of a bond company called the U.S. government.
If you don't have savings, and your co-founders are as poor as you are, and if Mom and Dad won't loan you money, then your best bet is to find people that know you - your friends. If they, too, won't help, then you're stuck seeking out angel investors.
Stock exchanges say that more than half of all trades are now executed by just a handful of high-frequency traders, who use rapid-fire computers to essentially force slower investors to give up profits, then disappear before anyone knows what happened.
I'm not an economist, but I have spent time around thousands of small-business owners and investors, and I remain skeptical - despite the best intentions of the Fed - that even lower interest rates can make a meaningful dent in our unemployment problem.
Eponymous brands aren't that popular with analysts and investors now. You can only take an eponymous brand with a living figurehead so far, they argue. What happens when they grow old and die? What happens when they misbehave and go seriously off-brand?
Some entrepreneurs talk of a high burn rate, high advertising rate, and so on, with no outcome, so it doesn't impress me. But an entrepreneur who has that kind of a feeling of responsibility towards his investors is somebody who will have all my support.
Early investors in Uber and Airbnb, though they remain private companies, have valued them at stratospheric multiples based largely on the notion that Uber will transform and dominate local transportation and Airbnb will revolutionize the hotel industry.
When herding behaviour among investors ramps up, a stock's or index's growth rate can increase faster than exponentially, leading to more herding. This positive feedback brings the system to a tipping point. About two-thirds of the time, a crash results.
Political elites look increasingly interchangeable: Blair, Brown, and Cameron have all tried to provide cover for the surrender of sovereignty to foreign investors with invocations of 'British' values, and, more opportunistically, anti-immigrant rhetoric.
If you're just interested in the prestige of banking, that's not what's going to sustain you. You have to be interested in what we do: managing and originating capital, helping issuers and investors come together is great, bringing these companies to life.
More and more investors may be coming into markets everywhere but that doesn't mean that the markets are really getting more and more efficient, even in the United States. It does mean that there is more access for savvy investors who watch the money flows.
Dealing with uncertainty is always a key challenge for investors. But dealing with uncertainty doesn't mean avoiding it - on the contrary, it is often fuzziness about a company's future that creates the type of opportunity bargain-hunting investors cherish.
Despite what some investors say, older age is an advantage in the startup world. You know more about industries and markets, and have ideas for products that the world actually needs and a better ability to motivate and manage than a kid out of school does.
If you're constantly making business decisions on behalf of your investors first, ultimately you're going to wear down your other stakeholders. It's going to be potentially hurtful for your employees and your customers and the community you do business with.
Somehow, failures in the public sector are always judged as systematic. The private sector thus exists to ride to the rescue - and their failures are only judged anomalies. A pretty nice arrangement for investors. The only people who suffer are the citizens.
Investors are always biased to invest in things they themselves understand. So venture capitalists like Uber because they like driving in black town cars. They don't like Airbnb because they like staying in five-star hotels, not sleeping on people's couches.
The actions taken by central banks and other authorities to stabilize a panic in the short run can work against stability in the long run if investors and firms infer from those actions that they will never bear the full consequences of excessive risk-taking.
Having billions of dollars immediately available to plug budget holes without raising taxes is very appealing. And to the delight of Wall Street investors, state and local governments often fail to ask the important questions or consider the long-term impact.
Many novice real estate investors soon quit the profession and invest in a well-diversified portfolio of bonds. That's because, when you invest in real estate, you often see a side of humanity that stocks, bonds, mutual funds, and saving money shelter you from.
In December 2014, Uber held its annual holiday party on an unfurnished floor at its swank, mood-lit headquarters in San Francisco. Employees and investors attended in flamboyant attire from the Roaring '20s and drank at an open bar into the early morning hours.
We have a government that borrows $4 billion a day. We have a government that owes trillions of dollars in debt, half of that to foreigners, most of that to Chinese investors. I don't - that is extreme. Not only is it extreme. It's insane and it's unsustainable.
During the 2005 Bush tax holiday, corporations didn't bring back the billions they stashed overseas to build new factories, increase wages, or create more jobs. The lion's share of that windfall went to CEO raises and stock buybacks for investors on Wall Street.
So much of what happened to India late last year and early into 2011 is the same story we've seen with other big emerging markets, and that is that investors started to realize that the growth trajectory in India would have to get moderated by tightening policy.
Our focus is not on exit. In fact if you talk to any of my entrepreneurs, I'm generally saying, 'Don't sell the company,' when other investors want to sell. I'd much rather focus on building long-term value in building companies rather than worrying about exits.
If you're CEO of a company, you have to be a public person. You're speaking to the press, you're speaking to investors, you're speaking to employees, you're the public face of the company and so kind of naturally you become more extroverted, more outwards facing.
We continue to advise that investors remain committed to a patient, long-term outlook and that the best way to do well in stocks is to use a disciplined, time-tested strategy that has the benefit of empirically tested results over a variety of market environments.
When high-growth companies slow down, growth and momentum junkies often sell indiscriminately, which can create great opportunities for value investors. Just be careful not to anchor on the stock's previous price or earnings multiple, which are no longer relevant.
Entrepreneurs or international conglomerateurs, or large financial institutions buy or create mutual fund management companies to create a return on their own capital. It's capitalism at work, where the rewards tend to go to the managers rather than the investors.
We're pretty broad as investors. Our thesis is work with great entrepreneurs that believe they can change the world. But there are specific areas that we get excited about - areas like hard tech, deep tech, companies that deal with really difficult technology, etc.
Of course, technology is not an exogenous force over which humans have no control. We are not constrained by a binary choice between acceptance and rejection. Rather, the decisions we make every day as citizens, consumers, and investors guide technological progress.
Most of my ideas come from drawing patterns across conversations I have with different types of people - technology investors, young fashion design students, a CEO. This variety is stimulating and offers many different perspectives on the things I am thinking about.
It's clear to me when you do private equity well, you're making companies more efficient and helping them grow and become more profitable. That success means our investors - such as public pension funds - benefit, which contributes to the economic wealth of society.
Banks and investors have poured money into dirty energy and high-carbon for decades. While no single policy is a magic bullet for the climate crisis, there is also no way of solving it that doesn't involve a fundamental reimagining of the role of our financial system.
Life inside successful Web startups - especially the really successful ones - can be nasty, brutish, and short. As companies grow exponentially, egos clash, investors jockey for control, and business complexities rapidly exceed the managerial abilities of the founders.
Enron had already collapsed and filed for bankruptcy protection by the beginning of 2002. But despite complaints from short sellers that corporations had used accounting gimmickry to inflate their profits, many investors thought the crisis at Enron was an isolated case.
Defaulting on the nation's debt would be cataclysmic. The U.S. Treasury's Aaa rating is the one constant in the world's financial system. When times are bad anywhere on the planet, global investors flock to Treasury bonds because they know they will get their money back.
Howard Stern gave me the best advice about Twitter and the N word. He said maybe onstage people get the intention behind the joke, but a tweet is 140 characters or less, and maybe that's why people overreact. I don't need to rustle any more feathers and lose any investors.
Strong credit markets give companies borrowing options to boost their stock prices while making bearish investors scramble to close out trades before losing any more money, both of which then push the stock market even higher and continue the self-reinforcing bullish cycle.
The lower spreads mean lower costs for investors, because Nasdaq investors generally do not trade directly with one another. Instead, they usually buy and sell from market-makers, brokerage firms that flip shares between buyers and sellers and keep the spread for themselves.
Venture capitalists are professional money managers. We are provided capital to invest as long as we can return it to our investors with a strong return in a reasonable amount of time. A strong return is three times cash on cash. A reasonable amount of time is ten years max.
I think a very good system in a world with a lot of passive investors is one in which there are at least a few entrepreneurial investors, prepared to say what they think, prepared to propose a change in management, change in strategy, change in cost structure, capital structure.
To get our economy back on track and keep it functioning properly without the problems of our financial institutions, we need reasonable regulations that will protect Main Street while at the same time allow Wall Street to do what it does best - make money for American investors.
The United States has the most sophisticated financial markets in the world, which does not leave much room to maneuver. But it also offers investors the greatest access to information and the ability to execute trades quickly and efficiently. So it is a mixed bag of opportunity.