Merton Miller Quotations

My main interest, however, was in economics, not law.

Of course. I favor passive investing for most investors, because markets are amazingly successful devices for incorporating information into stock prices.

I can't speak for them, of course, but I believe that most economists would accept the view that, while you sometimes can make a score by sheer luck, you can't do it constantly, unless you're willing to put the resources in.

Franco and I were both working on the problem, but from somewhat different perspectives - he from macroeconomics and me from corporate finance.

My research interests since then have shifted strongly towards the economic and regulatory problems of the financial services industry, and especially of the securities and options exchanges.

I was born in Boston, Massachusetts on May 16, 1923, the only child of Joel and Sylvia Miller.

What happened after publication of our paper was that, for the next 40 years, people said, all right, we now know the answer to the capital structure question under ideal conditions.

When I started worrying about stocks, it was the late 1930s and early 1940s and it didn't seem like a good way to make money then, either.

Another is, if you take money out of your left pocket and put it in your right pocket, you're no richer.

For me, as an economist, it was frustrating to have no sense of a theory of corporate finance to tie all this material together.

So everybody has some information. The function of the markets is to aggregate that information, evaluate it, and get it incorporated into prices.

Diversification is your buddy.

You only need to make one big score in finance to be a hero forever.

Junk bonds prove there's nothing magical in a Aaa bond rating.

Everyone recognizes that's a joke because obviously the number and shape of the pieces doesn't affect the size of the pizza. And similarly, the stocks, bonds, warrants, etc., issued don't affect the aggregate value of the firm.

Arbitrage proof has since been widely used throughout finance and economics.

As an economics undergraduate, I also worked on a part-time basis in Cambridge, Massachusetts, for a company that was advising customers about portfolio decisions, writing reports.

But in practice, if often comes down to not suffering a loss as big as the huge gain you made a while ago.

I should mention that I am a member of the board of directors of Dimensional Fund Advisors.

I had some of the students in my finance class actually do some empirical work on capital structures, to see if we could find any obvious patterns in the data, but we couldn't see any.

I favour passive investing for most investors, because markets are amazingly successful devices for incorporating information into stock prices.

If there's 10,000 people looking at the stocks and trying to pick winners, one in 10,000 is going to score, by chance alone, a great coup, and that's all that's going on. It's a game, it's a chance operation, and people think they are doing something purposeful... but they're really not.

My expertise was in public finance, particularly corporate taxation, since I had worked at the US Treasury.

Everybody has some information. The function of the markets is to aggregate that information, evaluate it and get it incorporated into prices.

... Any pension fund manager who doesn't have the vast majority-and I mean 70% or 80% of his or her portfolio-in passive investments is guilty of malfeasance, nonfeasance or some other kind of bad feasance!

Most people might just as well buy a share of the whole market, which pools all the information, than delude themselves into thinking they know something the market doesn't.

What counts is what you do with your money, not where it came from.

To beat the market you'll have to invest serious bucks to dig up information no one else has yet.