Muriel Siebert Quotes
100 Muriel Siebert Quotes
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[On bait advertising in discount brokerage] You have to look at all the fees.
Muriel Siebert
It’s a rip-off.
Muriel Siebert
[On becoming the New York State Bank Superintendent with oversight of some 500 banking institutions with more than $400 billion in assets, and over 1,000 small loan companies – all licensed by the state.] How could I refuse? For a kid from Cleveland, it was a real challenge.
Muriel Siebert
I could cover one bank, but a whole industry? I buried four of them. We managed to do it with only modest cost to the FDIC and no losses to depositors.
Muriel Siebert
You’ve got to give back to the system.
Muriel Siebert
The online firms have been offering too much to get new accounts. Seventy-five free trades if you open a new account? That’s really saying we’ll almost pay you to bring your account to us.
Muriel Siebert
If you find the reasons you like the stock in the first place are still there, you can be conservative and sell half to get your cost out. Or, if you expect a slow-up in earnings, sell more.
Muriel Siebert
Know a lot about a little.
Muriel Siebert
A risk-reward ratio is important, but so is an aggravation-satisfaction ratio.
Muriel Siebert
Any significant change in business is an opportunity for new business.
Muriel Siebert
Lead, follow or get the h*ll out of the way.
Muriel Siebert
Make the customer whole.
Muriel Siebert
If the client goes under, you’re the senior partner.
Muriel Siebert
If you’re not willing to accept the worst that can happen, don’t do it.
Muriel Siebert
I believe in taking the big chance when it comes along. I follow my hunches, but before I act, I look at the numbers – inside out and upside down.
Muriel Siebert
Selling to institutions was just like selling shoes – knowing the customer as well as the stock, getting a good fit.
Muriel Siebert
To get big, you’ve got to delegate. So if you want to have your hand in everything, you’ve got to stick with a tiny firm. If you’re going to be hands-on about anything, it should be your expenses.
Muriel Siebert
Suppliers can start to take a customer for granted.
Muriel Siebert
When I left Cleveland with five hundred dollars and a used Studebaker just before Thanksgiving 1954, I had been away from home and family only once. Travel was too extravagant and expensive in my childhood, except for the occasional overcrowded, overheated motor trip to Florida.
Muriel Siebert
The New York Stock Exchange, where a guide explained how the market was made: Trading was conducted at oak-and-brass posts called horseshoes, connected by pneumatic tubes to the stock ticker. Outside the posts stood specialists, who were expected to maintain an orderly market by buying and selling particular securities for their own accounts and by acting as agents in specific stocks…
Muriel Siebert
[On seeing Wall Street for the first time as a tourist] I never had a strategy, no long-term game plan. But after absorbing all that fierce energy, I turned to my friends and said, ‘Now, this is exciting. Maybe I’ll come back here and look for a job.’
Muriel Siebert
I still have the few inches of worn and faded tape that said, ‘Welcome to the NYSE Muriel Siebert.’ Turns out I wasn’t so welcome after all.
Muriel Siebert
There was no actual wall to scale 175 years later, when I made the Stock Exchange coed. Although I purchased a ‘seat’ on December 28, 1967, there was no place to sit down, either… The moment my hands really shock was when I signed the register. There’s a lot of history in that book. It’s huge – about nine inches thick, with the entire constitution of the Stock Exchange written in longhand and the signatures of everyone who’s ever been a member. I saw names from the Civil War…
Muriel Siebert
Women were expected to study teaching or nursing, but I decided to take a course in money and banking at the men’s college – I was the only woman, and the teacher would call on me as ‘the delegate from Mather.’
Muriel Siebert
My father’s $5,000 insurance policy paid for the burial expense, but several years of medical bills had eaten up his savings. There was no other estate.
Muriel Siebert
There were few job prospects for me when I arrived in New York. I applied at the United Nations, where my cousin Alvin Roseman was one of the U.S. representatives, and at Merrill Lynch, which I remembered from my visit as the biggest brokerage on the Exchange. Both prospective employers turned me down – the United Nations because I didn’t speak two languages and Merrill Lynch because I didn’t have a college degree. On my next interview, at Bache & Co., I lied about my degree and was offered two positions: The accounting department paid $75 a week; the research department paid only $65, but it sounded more interesting…
Muriel Siebert
I was really a glorified gofer, but you create your opportunities by performing, not complaining.
Muriel Siebert
From the beginning, the recondite world of figures seemed like second nature to me…
Muriel Siebert
I went down to the Exchange and handed over a check for the balance of the $445,000, remembering an old proverb ‘With money in your pocket, you are wise and you are handsome, and you sing well too.’ I went to a liquor store and bought three bottles of French champagne for the people in my office. Then I went to a Christmas party where a governor of the Stock Exchange asked me, ‘How many more women are there behind you?’ - as if I were leading a parade.
Muriel Siebert
[On getting her NYSE seat] A Baltimore paper quoted the reaction of one male securities analyst to my new status: ‘When it comes to picking good investments, management is most important. Women spend an awful lot of time trying to manage their husbands, so they have a natural advantage.’
Muriel Siebert
The first copy submitted for approval had a large photo of me with the caption ‘First Lady of the New York Stock Exchange – that’s Miss Muriel Siebert.’ It was turned down because the chairman thought his wife was the first lady. The ad was changed to read ‘first lady member’… That’s when I should have known I was going to be watched like a hawk.
Muriel Siebert
Every young woman fresh from college who wanted a job on Wall Street walked through my doors.
Muriel Siebert
Every woman who was widowed and left money seemed to come calling, and I realized that none of them had a real knowledge of finance.
Muriel Siebert
‘American moose pasture’ – my bowdlerization of bullsh*t in the presence of clients.
Muriel Siebert
Women controlled the overwhelming majority of outstanding corporate stock in America, but their knowledge of finance was practically nonexistent.
Muriel Siebert
I commissioned a survey of 137 senior women’s colleges and was shocked to learn of a huge education gap: Fully 85 percent of female graduates had never taken a single course in managing money. Not one.
Muriel Siebert
The institutions of higher learning in this country seemed to have agreed that it was more important to know how to dissect a frog than how to manage personal finances.
Muriel Siebert
[On a Mr Lasker saying in effect ‘Transfer your seat to a man’] Mr Lasker, the day that happens against my will, I’ll hold the biggest goddamn press conference the city of New York has ever seen.
Muriel Siebert
It was assumed that female brokers got their business from sleeping around. I used to deflect some propositions even-handedly by saying, ‘I think I’ve met your wife.’
Muriel Siebert
I kept a cartoon on my desk that showed a conservatively dressed father yelling at his hippie son, ‘What do you mean I’m not a rebel? When everybody was saying, ‘Sell, sell,’ I was saying, ‘Buy, buy.’
Muriel Siebert
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