If investing is entertaining, if you're having fun, you're probably not making any money. Good investing is boring.
Interpretation
Successful investing requires discipline and patience rather than excitement and entertainment.
This quote by George Soros highlights the idea that effective investing is not about entertainment or excitement, but rather about careful analysis and a methodical approach. When investing is reduced to a form of entertainment, it often leads to poor decision-making and losses, as the focus shifts from sound strategies to immediate gratification and thrill.
In practice
This quote can be used in a finance seminar to stress the importance of a disciplined approach to investing.
The securitisation of mortgages added a new dimension of systemic risk. Financial engineers claimed they were reducing risks through geographic diversification: in fact they were increasing them by creating an agency problem. The agents were more interested in maximising fee income than in protecting the interests of bondholders. That is the verity that was ignored by regulators and market participants alike.
The collapse of the global marketplace would be a traumatic event with unimaginable consequences. Yet I find it easier to imagine than the continuation of the present regime.
Regulating and taxing marijuana would simultaneously save taxpayers billions of dollars in enforcement and incarceration costs, while providing many billions of dollars in revenue annually.
We are the most powerful nation on earth. No external power, no terrorist organization can defeat us. But we can defeat ourselves by getting caught in a quagmire.
My foundations support people in the country who care about an open society. It's their work that I'm supporting. So it's not me doing it. But I can empower them. I can support them, and I can help them.
The criminalization of marijuana did not prevent marijuana from becoming the most widely used illegal substance in the United States and many other countries. But it did result in extensive costs and negative consequences.
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.
We are all powerless as children, and money looms so powerfully... we don't grow up to claim our financial power until we look money directly in the eye, face our fears, and claim that power back.
If I was counselling an individual, and my purpose was to help that individual, the most important thing would be that you should save more. Because don't expect that your retirement will follow those trajectories that some advisers are telling you.
When the market is just going up, up, and up, we all tend to be blind to the holes in the market. They're all papered over by the rise.
It's not a stretch to say the whole financial industry revolves around the compass point of the absolutely safe AAA rating. But the financial crisis happened because AAA ratings stopped being something that had to be earned and turned into something that could be paid for.
Bad debt is sacrificing your future day needs for your present day desires.
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