Top 40 Jack D. Schwager Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Actually, the best traders have no ego.”

— Jack D. Schwager

2. “Being wrong is acceptable, but staying wrong is totally unacceptable.”

— Jack D. Schwager

3. “If you don’t stay with your winners, you are not going to be able to pay for the losers.”

— Jack D. Schwager

4. “You don’t want to have a position before a move has started. You want to wait until the move is already under way before you get into the market.”

— Jack D. Schwager

5. “If instead of saying, “I’m going to do this trade,” you say, “I’m going to watch myself do this trade,” all of a sudden you find that the process is a lot easier.”

— Jack D. Schwager

6. “You just stay focused on what you have to do. Exactly.”

— Jack D. Schwager

7. “I discovered that you can’t train people how to trade by just imparting knowledge. The key to trading success is emotional discipline. Making money has nothing to do with intelligence. Think of all the bright people that choose careers on Wall Street. If intelligence were the key, there would be a lot more people making money trading.”

— Jack D. Schwager

8. “It is impossible to consistently outperform the market by using any information that the market already knows.”

— Jack D. Schwager

9. “Either go at it full force or don’t go at it at all. Don’t dabble.”

— Jack D. Schwager

10. “Even a poor trading system could make money with good money management.”

— Jack D. Schwager

11. “My goal on Wall Street was never to get rich but to stay in business. There’s a big difference. If you’re out of the business, you can never get rich. That’s why you have to be especially cautious when you’re trading a larger position size.”

— Jack D. Schwager

12. “When asked what he thought the average trader did wrong, Tom Baldwin, who in the days before electronic trading was the largest individual trader in the Treasury bond pit, replied, “They trade too much. They don’t pick their spots selectively enough.”

— Jack D. Schwager

13. “Make the calls. Maybe they won’t talk to you, but I guarantee that if you don’t call, they won’t talk to you.”

— Jack D. Schwager

14. “The idea that trading success is tied to finding some specific ideal approach is misguided. There is no single correct methodology.”

— Jack D. Schwager

15. “Excellence and achievement have a structure that can be copied. By modeling successful people, we can learn from the experience of those who have already succeeded.”

— Jack D. Schwager

16. “I feel my success comes from my love of the markets. I am not a casual trader. It is my life. I have a passion for trading. It is not merely a hobby or even a career choice for me. There is no question that this is what I am supposed to do with my life.”

— Jack D. Schwager

17. “Michael Jordan didn’t become a great basketball player because he wanted to do product endorsements. Van Gogh didn’t become a great painter because he dreamed that one day his paintings would sell for $50 million.”

— Jack D. Schwager

18. “I am always thinking about losing money as opposed to making money.”

— Jack D. Schwager

19. “The worst thing that can happen to you in the markets is being right and still losing money. That’s the danger in buying on rallies and selling on breaks these days.”

— Jack D. Schwager

20. “But the fact is: The people who are really successful in trading are tremendously hard workers.”

— Jack D. Schwager

21. “Charting is a little like surfing. You don’t have to know a lot about the physics of tides, resonance, and fluid dynamics in order to catch a good wave. You just have to be able to sense when it’s happening and then have the drive to act at the right time.”

— Jack D. Schwager

22. “Another way to determine the direction of the general market is to focus on how the leading stocks are performing. If the stocks that have been leading the bull market start breaking down, that is a major sign the market has topped. Another important factor to watch is the Federal Reserve discount rate. Usually, after the Fed raises the rate two or three times, the market runs into trouble.”

— Jack D. Schwager

23. “One of my favorite patterns is the tendency for the markets to move from relative lows to relative highs and vice versa every two to four days. This pattern is a function of human behavior. It takes several days of a market rallying before it looks really good. That’s when everyone wants to buy it, and that’s the time when the professionals, like myself, are selling. Conversely, when the market has been down for a few days, and everyone is bearish, that’s the time I like to be buying.”

— Jack D. Schwager

24. “Traders focus almost entirely on where to enter a trade. In reality, the entry size is often more important than the entry price.”

— Jack D. Schwager

25. “There is no single market secret to discover, no single correct way to trade the markets. Those seeking the one true answer to the markets haven’t even gotten as far as asking the right question, let alone getting the right answer.”

— Jack D. Schwager

26. “One of my rules was to get out when the volatility and the momentum became absolutely insane.”

— Jack D. Schwager

27. “When I see a picture like the 1861 cotton market, I ask myself, “What caused that? Why did that happen?” Then I try to figure it out. From that, you learn an enormous amount. In.”

— Jack D. Schwager

28. “Can you give me an example of how the lack of real world experience would hurt the researcher?”

— Jack D. Schwager

29. “Big market price changes happen when lots of people are forced to reevaluate their prejudices, not necessarily when the world actually changes. – Colm O’Shea.”

— Jack D. Schwager

30. “Debussy’s quote that “Music is the space between the notes,” because an analogous statement about trading – Trading is the space between trades – is so strikingly apropos.”

— Jack D. Schwager

31. “If I try to teach you what I do, you will fail because you are not me. If you hang around me, you will observe what I do, and you may pick up some good habits. But there are a lot of things you will want to do differently. Colm O’Shea.”

— Jack D. Schwager

32. “I succeeded because I didn’t know that I couldn’t.”

— Jack D. Schwager

33. “Buffett being penalized for underperforming versus managers riding the long side of the dot-com bubble is a perfect illustration of a common investor mistake – failing to realize that often the managers with the highest returns achieve those results because they’re taking the most risk, not because they have the greatest skill.”

— Jack D. Schwager

34. “Excessive worrying about taxes usually leads to unsound investments in the hope of achieving a tax shelter.”

— Jack D. Schwager

35. “Those who want to win and lack skill can get someone with skill to help them. I.”

— Jack D. Schwager

36. “What can a losing trader do to transform himself into a winning trader? A losing trader can do little to transform himself into a winning trader. A losing trader is not going to want to transform himself. That’s the kind of thing winning traders do.”

— Jack D. Schwager

37. “About every two generations – roughly every forty-seven to sixty years – there’s a deflationary market. For example, in respect to the commodity markets, we’re currently in a deflationary phase that began in 1980. Over the past two hundred years, these deflationary phases have typically lasted between eight and twelve years. Since we’re currently in the twelfth year of commodity price deflation, I think we’re very close to a major bottom in commodity prices.”

— Jack D. Schwager

38. “Investors often make the mistake of equating manager performance in a given year with manager skill. In some instances, more skilled managers will underperform because they refuse to participate in market bubbles. In fact, during market bubbles, the best performers are often the most imprudent rather than the most skilled managers.”

— Jack D. Schwager

39. “I figured out that for every dollar I made trading, 30 percent was going to the government, 30 percent was going to support my planes, and 20 percent was going to support my real estate. So I finally decided to sell everything.”

— Jack D. Schwager

40. “You can use charts to give you a plus or minus toward your view, but you can never start with the chart.”

— Jack D. Schwager

41. “Indeed, I have found that confidence is one of the most consistent traits exhibited by the successful traders I have interviewed.”

— Jack D. Schwager

42. “Failure Is Not Predictive.”

— Jack D. Schwager

43. “Now it’s no longer sufficient to assume that because you trade with the trend, you’ll make money. Of course, you still need to be with the trend, because it puts the percentages in your favor, but you also have to pay a lot more attention to where you’re getting in and out.”

— Jack D. Schwager

44. “I find that major trends are now frequently preceded by a sharp price change in the opposite direction. I still make my judgments as to probable price trends based on overall market action, as I always did. However, with a few exceptions, I now buy on breaks and sell on rallies.”

— Jack D. Schwager

45. “Coming back again to the investment bank world, they have meetings and all sorts of stuff going on that suck up time. Traders would all complain about the waste of time, but what it actually meant was that it limited the amount of time they were in front of their screens staring at their positions. You don’t want to be sitting in front of your screen and staring at market prices for 12 hours a day. Staring at the price is not going to tell you very much.”

— Jack D. Schwager

46. “In trading, 80 percent of your profits come from 20 percent of your ideas.”

— Jack D. Schwager

47. “The perspective I have on it now is that when I was trading my own account, it was like trading monopoly money. My trading capital was just something I kept score with. I detached myself emotionally from it.”

— Jack D. Schwager

48. “Kovner lists risk management as the key to successful trading; he always decides on an exit point before he puts on a trade. He also stresses the need for evaluating risk on a portfolio basis rather than viewing the risk of each trade independently. This is absolutely critical when one holds positions that are highly correlated, since the overall portfolio risk is likely to be much greater than the trader realizes.”

— Jack D. Schwager

49. “I have what I call my Evel Knievel screen. These are companies that are trying to jump the Grand Canyon and probably won’t make it. There are only two conditions for the screen. First, the company is trading at more than five times book value. Second, the company is losing money. My job is to figure out which stocks won’t make it across the Grand Canyon and then go short those stocks.”

— Jack D. Schwager