Some of the most interesting quotes from traders and market legends I’ve collected over the years.
Not because every one of them is universally right, but because together they say a lot about what trading actually comes down to: risk, patience, psychology, discipline and surviving your own stupidity.
My favourites are 2, 3, 9, 16, 23 and 24.
What about yours?
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1. “It never was my thinking that made the big money for me. It always was my sitting.”
Jesse Livermore
2. “The elements of good trading are cutting losses, cutting losses, and cutting losses.”
Ed Seykota
3. “I’m always thinking about losing money as opposed to making money. Don’t focus on making money, focus on protecting what you have.”
Paul Tudor Jones
4. “Risk management is the most important thing to be well understood. Undertrade, undertrade, undertrade.”
Bruce Kovner
5. “The way to build superior long term returns is through preservation of capital and home runs.”
Stanley Druckenmiller
6. “If most traders would learn to sit on their hands 50 percent of the time, they would make a lot more money.”
Bill Lipschutz
7. “If you don’t bet, you can’t win. If you lose all your chips, you can’t bet.”
Larry Hite
8. “The way of the successful investor is normally to do nothing, until you see money lying there in the corner.”
Jim Rogers
9. “I believe in analysis and not forecasting.”
Nicolas Darvas
10. “I made my money by selling too soon.”
Bernard Baruch
11. “The key is to wait. Sometimes the hardest thing to do is to do nothing.”
David Tepper
12. “Bull markets are born on pessimism, grow on skepticism, mature on optimism and die on euphoria.”
John Templeton
13. “It does not matter how frequently something succeeds if failure is too costly to bear.”
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
14. “Everyone has the brain power to make money in stocks. Not everyone has the stomach.”
Peter Lynch
15. “I’ve seen a lot more go to zero than infinity.”
James Chanos
16. “People should be highly sceptical of anyone’s, including their own, ability to predict the future.”
Seth Klarman
17. “Investing is a business where you can look very silly for a long period of time before you are proven right.”
Bill Ackman
18. “The only thing I do know is that from chaos comes opportunity.”
Daniel Loeb
19. “Every trader has strengths and weaknesses. As long as you stick to your own style, you get the good and bad in your own approach.”
Michael Marcus
20. “The goal of a successful trader is to make the best trades. Money is secondary.”
Alexander Elder
21. “The low happens on one day. The bull market lasts for years. The big money is made spotting trends, not bottoms.”
Mark Minervini
22. “Losers average losers.”
Paul Tudor Jones
23. “Markets are never wrong. Opinions often are.”
Jesse Livermore
24. “Win or lose, everybody gets what they want out of the market.”
Ed Seykota
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The older I get, the more interesting it is that almost none of the great traders talk about constantly finding the next trade.
They talk about waiting.
Cutting losses.
Protecting capital.
Controlling size.
Accepting that they will be wrong. Knowing when they have no edge. Staying alive long enough for the exceptional opportunities to matter.
Quite a contrast to modern Crypto Twitter, where half the industry seems to believe trading means finding 40 new tokens before breakfast.
