Stanley Druckenmiller Quotes

105 Stanley Druckenmiller Quotes

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[In March 2008 on Alchemy by George Soros.] I found the first chapter basically unreadable. I found the currency chapter interesting and actually quite useful…
Stanley Druckenmiller

[In March 2008.] Everybody forgets that the deutsche mark went down hard after the first two or three days. Everyone thought it would be polluted by this horrible East German money. I saw it differently.
Stanley Druckenmiller

[In March 2008.] I’m sure the lira idea came from him and not me. I’m also sure the pound idea came from me and not him.
Stanley Druckenmiller

[In March 2008 looking back on George Soros’s advice to go for the jugular.] This gets back to the genius I we were talking about. I can do all my fancy analysis. I can have the concepts, I can do the economics, and I can even have the timing, but one simple statement like that in terms of size… We probably got twice the profit I would have had without that snide comment he made about ‘Well, if you love it so much…’
Stanley Druckenmiller

[In March 2008.] I had never had a big drawdown from the day I arrived at Quantum until then. Even in ’94, when everyone got smoked, I was up 4 percent. I had never known any period of tension… Anyway, in 1999 I find myself down 18 percent in the month of May, and oh, by the way, the market is sharply up. You’re talking about a very proud guy who has never had a down year, essentially, and I’m getting killed. Obviously this is in the newspaper.
Stanley Druckenmiller

[In June 2008.] We were out of our own pond, and we really didn’t know what we were doing, so we didn’t do it.
Stanley Druckenmiller

[To his wife.] Money is supposed to be enjoyed, but if I can’t enjoy two weeks with my kids, what’s the point of it all?
Stanley Druckenmiller

[In August 2010.] After much self reflection, I have decided to retire from managing client funds and I wanted to give you prompt notice of my intentions and explain the reasons for this. I have had to recognize that competing in the markets over such a long timeframe imposes heavy personal costs. While the joy of winning for clients is immense, for me the disappointment of each interim drawdown over the years has taken a cumulative toll that I cannot continue to sustain.
Stanley Druckenmiller

[In August 2010.] Competing in the markets over such a long time frame imposes heavy personal costs.
Stanley Druckenmiller

[In February 2013.] The media was more concerned about the fiscal cliff and what might happen to the economy over the three months than the big picture which is the debt which is going to swallow our kids in 15 or 20 years.
Stanley Druckenmiller



[In February 2013.] The market is fine because you've got all the free money in the federal reserve. But that can only last so long. Eventually the hamster can't move on the wheel anymore…
Stanley Druckenmiller

[In February 2013.] Means-test people like me on social security. You realize I've done all right in life, okay? I'm going to start getting social security checks in five years. It's absurd. And I’ll get the same social security checks that some people who have not done so well are.
Stanley Druckenmiller

[In March 2013 on why he doesn’t become a policy maker.] Because my wife loves New York and I love my wife.
Stanley Druckenmiller

[In March 2013 on whether he will start tweeting on twitter.] No tweeting for me.
Stanley Druckenmiller

[In May 2013 when the Australian dollar was around US$1.023.] We think the Australian dollar will come down and will come down hard. It’s expensive.
Stanley Druckenmiller

[In June 2013.] I think ageing demographics is a bigger issue in China than people think. And the problems it creates should be become evident as early as 2016.
Stanley Druckenmiller

[In June 2013.] When I started in 1976, I was taught by my mentor that when cash flow rises equities go up. But commodities are driven by the cost of extraction 90% of the time, and over the long run, technology makes extraction cheaper, pushing the cost curve down and with it commodity prices. But that hasn’t always worked, if I’d followed that advice over the past few decades, I’d be in trouble.
Stanley Druckenmiller

[In June 2013.] I believe that good investors are successful not because of their IQ, but because they have an investing discipline.
Stanley Druckenmiller

[In June 2013.] My strength is economic forecasting, but that only works in free markets, when markets are smarter than people. That’s how I started. I watched the stock market, how equities reacted to change in levels of economic activity and I could understand how price signals worked and how to forecast them. Today, all these price signals are compromised…
Stanley Druckenmiller

[In June 2013.] If the most important price in the most important economy in the world is being rigged, and everything else is priced off it, what am I supposed to read into other price movements?
Stanley Druckenmiller



[In December 2013 on how he made a billion dollars in one day shorting the pound with George Soros.] Germany was unifying with East Germany. Their economies were simultaneously under a boom. At the same time their currency was linked to that of Great Britain. My European analyst called me in August of ’92 and said the U.K. couldn’t handle the interest rates to keep the pound aligned with the deutsche mark and that they were going into a housing recession. I put a billion-and-a-half-dollar short in on the pound… to see how this played out.
Stanley Druckenmiller

[In December 2013 more on how he made a billion dollars in one day shorting the pound with George Soros.] Over the next month or so the British economy continued to deteriorate. Then I came in one morning - I’ll never forget it - on the bottom of the editorial section of the Financial Times was the head of the Bundesbank, [Helmut] Schlesinger, saying that the two currencies shouldn’t be aligned. That, to me, was the trigger. I went in to George at 4 o’clock and laid out my scenario and told him I was going to do $5 billion in addition, 100 percent of the fund. He looked at me with total disdain. I said, ‘What’s wrong?’ He said, ‘You’re crazy to only bet 100 percent of the fund.’ We started about 7 o’clock that night. By midnight we had about $7 billion done, and the floor just blew out. It was a pretty exhilarating feeling to see that happening.
Stanley Druckenmiller

[In July 2014.] Do you remember all the hullabaloo in '07 about covenant light loans? They did a 100 billion in '07, and 38 percent of them were B rated. This year we're going to 300 billion. We did 260 billion last year, up from 90 billion a year, and 58 percent of them are B rated. So anybody who says they are not a bubble, I just don't agree with it.
Stanley Druckenmiller

[In July 2014.] In 1987, when the market crashed, I was convinced we were going to have a depression. So I'm not poking fun at people who have been wrong.
Stanley Druckenmiller

[In July 2014.] I have tremendous respect for Bill Gross, he has a tremendous record. But this argument we got to stay at zero percent because the debt is too high, why do you think the debt is too high? Because we've had an asymmetric monetary policy for 30 years. It was 150 percent debt to GDP when Greenspan took over, and it was 390 at the crisis. We're only down to 350. If we keep rates at zero percent, as I just pointed out, the party is just starting. The debt is now going like this, whereas the benefits are going like this.
Stanley Druckenmiller

[In July 2014.] The argument that we have to have zero rates because the debt is too high, it's a little scurrilous to me, because if rates stay at zero, the debt is going to explode. When do you ever pull the trigger? The answer is you don't.
Stanley Druckenmiller

[In July 2014.] We've got to get out of this financial engineering stuff and get more into investing in the real economy. If you want to spur growth, I don't think zero interest rates are the answer, because they have unintended consequences.
Stanley Druckenmiller

[In July 2014 on David Tepper investing big.] A guy who knows how to lay it on when he has a big opinion.
Stanley Druckenmiller

[In July 2014.] 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.
Stanley Druckenmiller

[In July 2014.] I hope we can all agree that once-in-a-century emergency measures are no longer necessary five years into an economic recovery.
Stanley Druckenmiller



[In July 2014.] There is a heated debate as to what a 'neutral' funds rate would be. We should be debating why we haven't moved more meaningfully toward the neutral funds rate if for no other reason so the Fed will have additional weapons available if the outlook darkens again.
Stanley Druckenmiller

[In January 2015.] 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.
Stanley Druckenmiller

[In January 2015.] I had an incredible passion, and still do, for the business.
Stanley Druckenmiller

[In January 2015.] One of the great things of this business, I get to gamble for a living and channel it through the markets instead of illegal activity.
Stanley Druckenmiller

[In January 2015.] I had two great mentors.
Stanley Druckenmiller

[In January 2015.] I think diversification and all the stuff they’re teaching at business school today is probably the most misguided concept everywhere.
Stanley Druckenmiller

[In January 2015.] 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…
Stanley Druckenmiller

[In January 2015.] Never, ever invest in the present. It doesn’t matter what a company’s earning, what they have earned… You have to visualize the situation 18 months from now, and whatever that is, that’s where the price will be, not where it is today.
Stanley Druckenmiller

[In January 2015.] 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… It’s liquidity that moves markets.
Stanley Druckenmiller

[In January 2015.] When I started at Duquesne, Ronald Reagan had become President, and we had a radical man named Paul Volcker running the Federal Reserve. And inflation was 12 percent. The whole world thought it was going to go through the roof, and Paul Volcker had other ideas. And he had raised interest rates to 18 percent on the short end, and I could see that there is no way this man was going to let inflation go… I had a small amount of new capital. I took 50 percent of the capital and put it into 30 year treasury bonds yielding 14 percent, and I owned nothing else… And sure enough, the bonds went up despite a bear market in equities. Right out of the chute I was able to be up 40 percent.
Stanley Druckenmiller



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