Mariko Gordon Quotes
103 Mariko Gordon Quotes (Daruma Capital Management)
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In 1995 I started Daruma with zero assets under management, but with a clear goal: to build an investment firm where the business of money management would never interfere with my calling as a portfolio manager. My role at Daruma is to ensure that we never become complacent, and that we always strive to enhance our investment process.
Mariko Gordon
My father’s father… was a fierce autodidact [A self-taught person and believer in self-education.] and a wicked bridge player; he survived the 1929 stock market crash because he didn’t believe in leverage.
Mariko Gordon
[In September 2009.] We value types may just be weirdly ghoulish - always anticipating investment meltdowns, and when they hit, hoping to profit by hunting for a bargain. Maybe so, but it sure beats getting caught in a money-losing riptide.
Mariko Gordon
[In August 2010.] Stockpicking forces you to eat large doses of humble pie, but it also turns out to be a pretty good diet for the soul.
Mariko Gordon
[In August 2009.] Numbers are no more trustworthy than words. Financial statements are imperfect representations of the complexities they describe. There's a lot of subjective interpretation in accounting, and a con is just as easily perpetuated in numbers as in fast-talking words.
Mariko Gordon
[In October 2009.] Faced with the performance doldrums, good managers do the sensible thing - make sure there's no leak in the hull, remove whatever barnacles may be slowing down the ship, and wait for the wind to start blowing again.
Mariko Gordon
[In November 2009.] Simplicity rules… If you don't understand it, it will lose you money.
Mariko Gordon
[In November 2009.] If it's incomprehensible, it's uninvestable.
Mariko Gordon
[In November 2009.] The way to make money is to question the Emperor's new clothes…
Mariko Gordon
[In December 2009.] I’ve always been a big believer that investing is as much about decision-making as it is finance, and decision-making is very much about psychology.
Mariko Gordon
[In February 2012.] No matter how much due diligence you do before you buy a stock, you will never know a company as well as after you've owned it for a while.
Mariko Gordon
[In April 2013.] While data can be indisputable, the conclusions derived from such data are not.
Mariko Gordon
[In June 1997.] We're a specialized niche boutique. We're not interested in being Fidelity or Vanguard. If you want to be a mutualfund complex, then having one fund isn't going to cut it. But if you want to be a niche provider, what's perceived as a disadvantage is something we don't really care about.
Mariko Gordon
[In May 1998 on when to sell.] Often my decision to sell is prompted by a desire to buy something else… I thought it was a better use of capital.
Mariko Gordon
[In June 2008.] We've added an extra layer of mindfulness. When we review the portfolio, we're now forced to ask the question, Is our itchiness just an emotional response? Or are there reasons to sell relative to risk and fundamental valuation?
Mariko Gordon
[In September 2008.] If a company is leveraged and revenues are plummeting, then a credit crunch will put it out of business, regardless of size. Just being big doesn't protect you from extinction in tough times. (Remember the dinosaur?)
Mariko Gordon
[In November 2008.] It's time to start looking for the pony in the dungheap of financial news…
Mariko Gordon
[In November 2008.] In our experience, when the dungheap is this big, not only are we more likely to find a thoroughbred than a mere pony, we can be sure to get him at a great price.
Mariko Gordon
[In January 2009.] Sound investment has always been about the people behind the numbers. And while past performance may not be a guarantee of future returns, past behavior - good or bad - usually is. So go ahead... ask what your manager eats for breakfast.
Mariko Gordon
[In February 2009.] When a trade gets too crowded, it's your financial life that may be in danger.
Mariko Gordon
[In March 2009.] A strong stomach is a necessary trait for any professional investor.
Mariko Gordon
[In March 2009.] Stubbornness in the face of contrary evidence is an Achilles heel, particularly in business and investing.
Mariko Gordon
[In March 2009.] In this line of work you're going to be wrong a lot of time, something that's not always easy to admit. But the key is to be right more often than wrong; to win big and lose small.
Mariko Gordon
[In March 2009.] There's a lot of value to be had from taking a systematic look at what drove your performance. I subscribe to the behavioral finance theory that we do things and are constantly justifying things in our own head. So it's nice to have a mechanism to see whether there's a systematic pattern and to see whether it's getting in the way.
Mariko Gordon
[In April 2009.] The number of otherwise sane people in the business telling me about the size of their personal gold stashes because ‘this isn't just a financial crisis but a financial Armageddon, you know’ has become ridiculous… I think it's gone much too far. There's a difference between our current circumstances and those that require action of the bomb-shelter-building, gold-stashing, diamond-sewing-into-hems sort.
Mariko Gordon
[In April 2009.] Happiness is extremely contagious, and if you hang out with happy people, you get happier as a result.
Mariko Gordon
[In April 2009.] Happiness and fear-induced paralysis are mutually exclusive.
Mariko Gordon
[In June 2009.] Value is created on the ground and specifics are what help ferret this out.
Mariko Gordon
[In July 2009.] If you believe the volume of research that shows women invest differently than men (some have argued better than men), a single-sex portfolio is an undiversified, riskier portfolio.
Mariko Gordon
[In August 2009.] No matter with how much math, accounting and economics we dress up investing, all of us professional investors are financial versions of Madame Zelda, the fortune teller. We have to be - our investment decisions are based on our predictions of the future.
Mariko Gordon
[In August 2009.] We predict what stocks are going to go up, based on plodding trend extrapolation about inflation, interest rates, the economy, the global geopolitical climate, the weather, and whatever else we can think of. The numbers are there to make our predictions seem more like science, and less like emotion-tinged guesswork.
Mariko Gordon
[In August 2009.] Why then do we perpetuate the charade that our investment analysis is emotion-free, that our precise and arithmetically correct calculations make no guesses about the future, and that valuation is never subject to psychology? After all, while prices may be set using mathematical frameworks, the people paying the prices are more Captain Kirk than Spock.
Mariko Gordon
[In August 2009.] Precise analytical calculations are no substitute for good human judgment; the kind of good judgment that is grounded in all parts of our neurochemistry.
Mariko Gordon
[In September 2009.] Being alive is risky… For me, managing the downside in life (not to mention investing) is well worth the time and effort.
Mariko Gordon
[In September 2009.] When the crash of 1987 happened, I was working for small-cap value maven
Chuck Royce. From time to time, throughout Black Monday, we clustered around our trader Ken's quotron, watching the Acapulco swan dive that was the market, and then went back to our desks to work. The atmosphere was calm; Chuck spent most of the day buying stocks hand over fist. It was only when I walked around my neighborhood after work that I realized our lack of hysteria was unusual. There were guys walking around with glazed expressions, ties askew and completely disheveled.
Mariko Gordon
[In September 2009.] When Black Monday hit, many investors did nothing, shocked into inaction by the ‘impossibility’ of what they were seeing. Chuck Royce spotted the buying opportunity of a lifetime and made a killing as a result.
Mariko Gordon
[In October 2009.] As an old colleague was fond of saying, ‘Mr. Market likes to give the maximum amount of people the maximum amount of pain.’
Mariko Gordon
[In October 2009.] Think back to 1999 and the Dot Com craziness that resulted in an entire generation of deep value managers hemorrhaging assets, many of whom, convinced that the rules of investing had permanently changed, simply retired.
Mariko Gordon
[In November 2009.] The plain truth is that no matter how good the program, there is much about investing in real life that no one teaches you at school.
Mariko Gordon
[In November 2009.] The future is imprecise. The value of a security today cannot be precisely known… Your precise formula is a function of imprecise inputs.
Mariko Gordon
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