Investing should be more like watching paint dry or watching grass grow. If you want excitement, take $800 and go to Las Vegas.
Interpretation
Investing should be approached with patience and not as a source of excitement.
This quote by Paul Samuelson emphasizes that investing is a slow and steady process that requires patience, and it should not be viewed as a thrilling endeavor. Instead of seeking immediate excitement and action, one should understand that successful investing is about long-term growth, much like the gradual changes we observe in nature.
In practice
A financial advisor might use this quote to educate clients about the importance of a long-term investment strategy.
To a person of analytical ability, perceptive enough to realise that mathematical equipment was a powerful sword in economics, the world of economics was his or her oyster in 1935. The terrain was strewn with beautiful theorems begging to be picked up and arranged in unified order.
I can't think of a president who has been overburdened by a knowledge of economics.
My belief is that nothing that can be expressed by mathematics cannot be expressed by careful use of literary words.
Politicians like to tell people what they want to hear - and what they want to hear is what won't happen.
My family was well off but not rich. I spent the four years I was an undergraduate working on the beach. And it wasn't because I was lazy; it was because my freshman class would go to a hundred different employers and wouldn't get a nibble. That was a disequilibrium system. I realized that the ordinary old-fashioned Euclidean geometry didn't apply.
Economics has never been a science - and it is even less now than a few years ago.
When getting help with money, whether it is insurance, real estate or investments you should always look for a person with the heart of a teacher, not the heart of a salesman.
Everyone has the brainpower to follow the stock market. If you made it through fifth-grade math, you can do it.
A single agency responsible for systemic risk would be accountable in a way that no regulator was in the run-up to the 2008 crisis. With access to all necessary information to monitor the markets, this regulator would have a better chance of identifying and limiting the impact of future speculative bubbles.
There is no more reason to believe that Bitcoin will stand the test of time than that governments will protect the value of government-created money, although Bitcoin is newer, and we always look at babies with hope.
There will always be bull markets followed by bear markets followed by bull markets
When interest rates are low we have conditions for asset bubbles to develop, and they are developing at the moment. The ultimate asset bubble is gold.
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