Stanley Druckenmiller Quotes

105 Stanley Druckenmiller Quotes (Stan Druckenmiller, Duquesne Capital Management.)

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[In July 2014.] The key to money management. It's making a lot of money when you're right and minimizing it when you're wrong.
Stanley Druckenmiller

What I learned from George Soros… when you see it, to bet big.
Stanley Druckenmiller

[On George Soros.] He was taking my ideas and he just had more guts. He was betting more money with my ideas than I was.
Stanley Druckenmiller

[On being a contrarian when it counted.] I saw it differently.
Stanley Druckenmiller

Put all your eggs in one basket and then watch the basket very carefully.
Stanley Druckenmiller

[In January 2015 on zero percent interest rates.] When you have zero money for so long, the marginal benefits you get through consumption greatly diminish, but there’s one thing that doesn’t diminish, which is unintended consequences.
Stanley Druckenmiller

[In January 2015.] The fed keeps talking about deflation, but there is nothing more deflationary than creating a phoney asset bubble, having a bunch of investors plow into it and then having it pop. That is deflationary.
Stanley Druckenmiller

[As a boy.] I'm gonna be a millionaire someday.
Stanley Druckenmiller

[In August 1989 to George Soros.] I feel cramped by your presence. I’m intimidated and I fell dissatisfied because I don’t think I’m doing as well as I could. I want to leave. [‘Don’t leave. I’ll leave. I’m going to Europe. Now we’ll find out whether I’ve just been in your hair too much or whether you really are inept.’ – George Soros]
Stanley Druckenmiller

[In 1992 on how he became appointed the director of equity research in 1978 at the age of only 25 when Speros Drelles the director of investments demoted Stanley Druckenmiller’s boss after his boss having been with the bank for over 25 years and was approximately 50 years old.] [‘You know why I’m doing this, don’t you?’ –Speros Drelles] No. [‘For the same reason they send eighteen-year-olds into war.’ –Speros Drelles] Why is that? [‘Because they’re too dumb to know not to charge. The small cap [capitalization] stocks have been in a bear market for ten years, and I think there’s going to be a huge, liquidity-driven bull market sometime in the next decade. Frankly, I have a lot of scars from the past ten years, while you don’t. I think we’ll make a great team because you’ll be too stupid and inexperienced to know not to try to buy everything. That other guy out there [referring to Stanley Druckenmiller’s boss who he was just replacing] is just as stale as I am.
Stanley Druckenmiller



[In 1992.] 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… Even today, many analysts still don’t know what makes their particular stocks go up and down… Very often the key factor is related to earnings.
Stanley Druckenmiller

[In 1992.] The ideal time to buy the chemical stocks is after a lot of capacity has left the industry and there’s a catalyst that you believe will trigger an increase in demand. Conversely, the ideal time to sell these stocks is when there are lots of announcements for new plants, not when the earnings turn down.
Stanley Druckenmiller

[In 1992.] I learned that you could be right on a market and still end up losing if you use excessive leverage.
Stanley Druckenmiller

[In 1992.] He had gone short at exactly the top, right around the time I had told his sister not to worry about an imminent top in the stock market.
Stanley Druckenmiller

[In 1992.] Soros had actually started referring to me as his ‘successor’ before I ever joined the firm. When I went to Soros’s home to be interviewed, his son informed me that I was his tenth ‘successor.’ None of the others had lasted too long. He thought it was hysterical. And when I arrived at Soros’s office the next day, the staff all referred to me as ‘the successor.’ They also thought it was very funny.
Stanley Druckenmiller

[In 1992.] In my opinion, George Soros is the greatest investor that ever lived.
Stanley Druckenmiller

[In 1992.] You just can’t have two cooks in the kitchen; it doesn’t work.
Stanley Druckenmiller

[In 1992.] George Soros has a philosophy that I have also adopted: The way to build long-term returns is through preservation of capital and home runs.
Stanley Druckenmiller

[In 1992.] On the most significant thing that he learnt from George Soros.] 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.
Stanley Druckenmiller

[In 1992.] Soros has taught me that when you have tremendous conviction on a trade, you have to go for the jugular. It takes courage to be a pig. It takes courage to ride a profit with huge leverage.
Stanley Druckenmiller



[In March 1998.] If you lie down with dogs, you get up with fleas.
Stanley Druckenmiller

[In March 1998.] Embarrassment is a great motivator.
Stanley Druckenmiller

[In March 1998 on him being a little different from other mutual fund managers.] We all gamble with other people’s money and charge them a fee.
Stanley Druckenmiller

[In March 1998.] Growing up in mid-America, I was always taught – I’m not saying I always do it – to buy low and sell high.
Stanley Druckenmiller

[In March 1998.] If we don’t like the market, we don’t just go to 20% cash; we might actually go net short.
Stanley Druckenmiller

[In March 1998.] Were you really are going to make, or lose, money for shareholders is with the decision to be in or out of the market. That’s the big decision, not daily trading in derivatives or some fancy insurance spread.
Stanley Druckenmiller

[In March 1998.] What we do is old-fashioned, actually. All the derivates do is greatly increase the speed at which we can move, should we have to.
Stanley Druckenmiller

[In March 1998.] Our mandate, as we look at it, is to make money on an absolute basis, to protect our shareholders in declines and try and make money in any environment. You can’t really compare us with people whose charters are to be fully invested no matter what.
Stanley Druckenmiller

[In March 1998.] When catalysts come in to change the market’s direction… you have to realise that the decline could be very major…
Stanley Druckenmiller

[In March 1998.] Valuation is something we keep in the back of our minds.
Stanley Druckenmiller



[In March 1998.] Looking at the great bull markets of this century, the best environment for stocks is a very dull, slow economy…
Stanley Druckenmiller

[In August 1998 on his groups losses from its Russian investments being close to $2 billion.] It is too painful for me to look. We were hit by everything… We are not morons, if you buy at 100 percent rates. We are big boys, we know we deserve everything that happened. Why should we gripe?… We are extremely fortunate that we are a hedge fund and have done other things well this year so we are certainly in the black. So it has turned a potentially great year into an average one.
Stanley Druckenmiller

[In April 2000.] It would have been nice to go out on top, like Michael Jordan. But I overplayed my hand.
Stanley Druckenmiller

[In May 2000.] I’m not so hot in equities.
Stanley Druckenmiller

[In March 2008 on looking back on having worked for George Soros.] When I went over there, I did expect to get fired in a year, but I didn’t really care because I thought I would get some kind of postgraduate education.
Stanley Druckenmiller

[In March 2008.] He wasn’t the boss of the trading, and I wasn’t the boss of the trading, and it was awful. I believe I was screwing up his trading and I believe he was screwing up mine. You just can’t have two cooks in the kitchen.
Stanley Druckenmiller

[In March 2008 on George Soros.] There were many times where he would question my positions and therefore want me to reduce them, but I rarely listened. He may have just been testing me.
Stanley Druckenmiller

[In March 2008.] I did not like the publicity we had at Soros. I tolerated it because I thought it was for a noble purpose. He needed it as a platform for his philanthropy. I didn’t read it as he was doing it for his ego. He was trying to meet with heads of state, and he needed a platform, which it surely gave him. So the idea of me staying in the background and him doing the publicity was fine.
Stanley Druckenmiller

[In March 2008.] The way I figure out the economy is literally from the bottom up and from company anecdotal information, knowing that housing leads retail and retail leads capital spending. From listening to the guys on the ground. When you talk to companies and to guys who run companies, you get a whole additional perspective on the economy…
Stanley Druckenmiller

[In March 2008.] I learned a lot at Soros, but not what I thought I would learn. I did not learn what makes the yen go up or down, or what makes the stock market go up or down. Soros’s great gift was how to use leverage, and how much money to have down based on the risk/reward and your sense of conviction. His view on the yen or the euro was better than random, but not much. And yet he was still one of the great money managers ever because he knew how to bet his convictions.
Stanley Druckenmiller



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