Stanley Druckenmiller Quotes

“An investor should never let someone else's opinion drive their decision in stocks.

Mr. Buffett and I have a different opinion on IBM. I certainly respect his opinion. But I have my own.”

“As a boy I always said: I'm gonna be a millionaire someday.”

“Bitcoin is like anything else: it’s worth what people are willing to pay for it.”

“Carried interest... you're making money on somebody else's capital. It's not on your own. If that's not income, I don't know what is.”

“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.”

“Embarrassment is a great motivator.”

“Every great money manager I've ever met, all they want to talk about is their mistakes. There's a great humility there.”

“Every serious deflation I've looked at is preceded by an asset bubble, and then it bursts.”

“Everyone sort of lives with their rulers in the past and doesn’t look at coming changes.”

“I am fearful that today our obsession with what will happen to markets and the economy in the near term is causing us to misjudge the accumulation of much greater long term risks to our economy.”

“I believe that good investors are successful not because of their IQ, but because they have an investing discipline.

But, what is more disciplined than a machine? A well-researched machine can make many average investors redundant, leaving behind only the really good human investors with exceptional intuition and skill.”

“I don't put Tesla in the Amazon category. They have not proved to me that, as a financial model and an economic model, it is going to work.”

“I don't really like hedging. To me, if something needs to be hedged, you shouldn't have a position in it.”

“I don't think Donald Trump is Ronald Reagan.”

“I don't think robots and greater automation can bring about a utopian world as I imagined it would as a kid 50 years ago.”

“I don’t like the repeal of the estate tax.”

“I hope we can all agree that once-in-a-century emergency measures are no longer necessary five years into an economic recovery.”

“I learned that you could be right on a market and still end up losing if you use excessive leverage.”

“I like putting all my eggs in one basket and then watching the basket very carefully.”

“I love Amazon. I think Bezos is incredible.”

“I love being around kids. I couldn't figure out why all these 70-year-olds wanted to hang out with me when I was 27.

Now I understand, and I'm trying to steal their energy from them like they stole from me at the time.”

“I particularly remember the time I gave the research director my paper on the banking industry. I felt very proud of my work. However, he read through it and said, 'This is useless. What makes the stock go up and down?'

That comment acted as a spur. Thereafter, I focused my analysis on seeking to identify the factors that were strongly correlated to a stock's price movement as opposed to looking at all the fundamentals.

Frankly, even today, many analysts still don't know what makes their particular stocks go up and down.”

“I think diversification and all the stuff they're teaching at business school today is probably the most misguided concept everywhere.”

“I've thought a lot of things when I'm managing money with great, great conviction, and a lot of times I'm wrong.

And when you're betting the ranch and the circumstances change, you have to change, and that's how I've always managed money.”

“I’m not genius. I was not in the top 10 percent of my high school class.

My SATs were so mediocre I went to Bowdoin because it was the only good school that didn’t require SATs and it turned out to be a very fortunate event for me.”

“I’ve always loved to play games, and face it: investing is one big game. You need to be decisive, open-minded, flexible and competitive.”

“I’ve learned many things from George Soros, but perhaps the most significant is that it’s not whether you’re right or wrong that’s important, but how much money you make when you’re right and how much you lose when you’re wrong.”

“If you lie down with dogs, you get up with fleas.”

“If you look at all the great investors that are as different as Warren Buffett, Carl Icahn, Ken Langone, they tend to be very, very concentrated bets. They see something, they bet it, and they bet the ranch on it.

And that’s kind of the way my philosophy evolved, which was if you see – only maybe one or two times a year do you see something that really, really excites you.

And if you look at what excites you and then you look down the road, your record on those particular transactions is far superior to everything else.”

“If you see it, you got to go for it.”