Words matter. These are the best Ron Chernow Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
Mutual funds give people the sense that they’re investing with the big boys and that they’re really not at a disadvantage entering the stock market.
Mutual funds have historically offered safety and diversification. And they spare you the responsibility of picking individual stocks.
I have developed a very strong partiality for the dead: they don’t talk back, they don’t sue, and they don’t have angry relatives.
The securities laws of the 1930s were so important because it forced companies to file registration statements and issue prospectuses, and it remedied the imbalance of information.
The history of Wall Street is inseparable from New York.
I felt blessed by the existence of Horace Porter’s ‘Campaigning With Grant.’
What I find very interesting about the mutual funds managers is that here are people who are the new masters of the universe. They’re managing billions, yet they’re subject to this quiet daily tyranny of numbers.
The founding fathers were not only brilliant, they were system builders and systematic thinkers. They came up with comprehensive plans and visions.
After being Washington’s aide for four years and becoming the hero of Yorktown, Hamilton was viewed with a great deal of suspicion because of his association with Tories.
In many ways, the North won the Civil War militarily and then lost the peace. You know, a group of writers, included many Confederate generals, began a school of thought called the Lost Cause in which they began to romanticize the Confederacy.
The thing with all the Founding Fathers, one of the most common words they used was ‘posterity.’ They were constantly referring to posterity.
Because of the love affair between the American public and the stock market, it is possible for entrepreneurs, technological visionaries and inventors of every sort to get financing.
Politics boils down to the stories we tell ourselves. And unfortunately, we tell ourselves different stories.
I don’t think that a mutual fund that invests exclusively in biotech start-ups or invests exclusively in companies in Thailand offers any great safety or diversification.
Stock market corrections, although painful at the time, are actually a very healthy part of the whole mechanism, because there are always speculative excesses that develop, particularly during the long bull market.
After 1929, so many people had been traumatized by the stock market crash that there was a lost generation.
When news of the crash came, probably a lot of people in small towns and farms across America felt a sense of grim satisfaction that the sinners had finally been punished for their wicked ways.
As a bull market continues, almost anything you buy goes up. It makes you feel that investing in stocks is a very easy and safe and that you’re a financial genius.
The best argument for mutual funds is that they offer safety and diversification. But they don’t necessarily offer safety and diversification.
I find that when I come upon something that I think is a historical revelation, I have the sort of adrenaline rush that I imagine a gambler gets in Las Vegas when he hits the jackpot. It’s still tremendously exciting to me, and I think all of my peers in the business feel the same way.
I’m a biographer; I can live with a little hyperbole.
Mutual fund managers are trapped in this rather deadly vicious circle: the more successful they are, the more money flows into their mutual fund. Then, it is more difficult for them to beat the market averages or even to match their own past performance.
I think there’s a tide that tends to carry historians back to the past.
There is no country in the world where it’s as easy to find venture capital in the stock market as the United States.
I never imagined that Hamilton would be turned into a musical, much less a hip-hop musical. I think I can safely say that that’s the last thing I would have expected.
There were 900 books on Washington when I began writing on him.
I was quite bowled over by Isabel Wilkerson’s masterly saga, ‘The Warmth of Other Suns.’
Reconstruction is the great black hole that remains to be filled. Even experts on the Civil War don’t really understand its full significance.
We really haven’t had very much experience with people funding their retirement out of the stock market, and we don’t know, frankly, how it would work under every scenario.
In the 1920s, Wall Street was a world that was really dominated by professional speculators and stock pools. These people had a monopoly over information.
Early on, New York already had a national and even international identity.
I’m sure there are many more people who can identify with failure and hardship in life than with the success of an Alexander Hamilton or a John D. Rockefeller.
I never dreamed that I would be autographing Playbills.
You don’t want too much fear in a market, because people will be blinded to some very good buying opportunities. You don’t want too much complacency because people will be blinded to some risk.
The Great Inflation of the 1970s destroyed faith in paper assets, because if you held a bond, suddenly the bond was worth much less money than it was before.
In the 1970s we saw a massive shift of household savings from the banks to the brokerage firms.
Every time I wrote fiction, I was discouraged, and every time I wrote nonfiction, I was encouraged.
In the 1920s you could buy stocks on margin. You could put 10 percent down and borrow the rest against your stocks.
Once the brokerage house, rather than the bank, became the locus for American savings, that money would find its way into the stock market, because the broker was someone with a much higher tolerance for risk than the banker.
One of the special characteristics of New York is that it is different from a London or a Paris because it’s the financial capital, and the cultural capital, but not the political capital.
I always sympathize with people who complain about the length of my books. It would take me a year to get through one of them.
That strategy of buy and hold, which is the sound and sensible one for the individual, can have very dangerous and perverse effects for the market as a whole.
As the bull market goes on, people who take great risks achieve great rewards, seemingly without punishment. It’s like crime without punishment or sex without sin.
A lot of the money in the stock market is really our national retirement plan, for better or worse.
