James Dinan Quotes
107 James Dinan Quotes
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[In May 2010.] We don’t think the end is near. Societies adapt. People adapt. Organizations adapt.
James Dinan
[In September 2010 on takeovers, noting Sanofi-Aventis’s recent unsolicited bid for Genzyme Corp.] We’re almost at the beginning of a super-cycle.
James Dinan
[In September 2010.] Potentially we think you might see other industry players get involved. Hopefully we don’t get a double dip. Hopefully Warren Buffett’s right. I think we’re at the dawn of a huge, huge, amount of merger and acquisitions activity.
James Dinan
[In February 2011 on making a $1 million donation to the Museum of the City of New York.] The story of New York is the greatest story ever told and we think New Yorkers should tell the world. The city has never really had a world-class museum dedicated to its own history.
James Dinan
[In February 2012.] The best education was on the job.
James Dinan
[In February 2012 at one of his first jobs at DLG where he learnt the fundamentals of arbitrage investing.] DLG used to be known as the house that research built.
James Dinan
[In February 2012.] There now no real information advantage anymore today. Now it’s much more of a judgement game.
James Dinan
[In February 2012.] Most people when they’re young, are very eager to get to the end of the game. Basically to be successful as quickly as possible. And what they forget is everybody has the same ending – unfortunately. And it’s really the journey that’s what’s most important.
James Dinan
[In February 2012.] I’m a big believer in a liberal-arts education.
James Dinan
[In February 2012.] It’s a very narrow individual who has interests and knowledge in only one subject.
James Dinan
[In February 2012.] One of the things I do very well investing is, I gather a lot of information but I never know the whole picture. I have a lot of inputs but never everything and I have to make a decision on incomplete information. And I feel very comfortable doing it. [In directly related to his hearing loss.] All my life I’ve had to make decisions based on hearing incomplete information. I have to fill in the blanks a lot... When you’re only hearing two-thirds of what the teacher is saying you either guess what the other one-third is and go with it or basically you’re in real trouble. I just learnt early on to start guessing and I was consistently almost right.
James Dinan
[In February 2012.] I think it makes me feel very comfortable to quote ‘fill in the blanks’ in my professional career.
James Dinan
[In February 2012.] Everybody gets setbacks and everybody has adversities. And the key is to rise to the challenges, take the time to compensate and don’t be ashamed and don’t be a wallflower.
James Dinan
[In February 2012.] I always wanted to have my own firm… I was 31 when I left to start York Capital.
James Dinan
[In February 2012.] When you’re twenty-eight you think you know everything. When you’re thirty-one you think you know everything. Now I’m fifty-two you know you realize you didn’t really know that much. The hubris of youth.
James Dinan
[In February 2012.] It was really hard to raise money... I raised about $3.5 million dollars and it took me almost 7 months to do that. $3.625 million to be exact. In those days you remember the exact numbers. Today we’re just shy of $15 billion.
James Dinan
[In February 2012 on starting a fund with only $3.625 million which would only really breakeven after overheads. But having a dream which in February 2012 became just under $15 billion.] If you build it they will come… That was in my mind.
James Dinan
[In February 2012.] I was hoping to build a reasonably successful investment management firm. Really a hedge fund. And by reasonably successful, I was hoping at the time to one day run a $100-200 million dollar fund… That would have made me reasonably successful.
James Dinan
[In February 2012 on what it made him by ‘Running a $14.2 billion hedge fund.’] A really lucky guy.
James Dinan
[In February 2012 on building hedge fund results first before really spending the energy to go out raising money.] Build the foundation before you really start to try to build the house.
James Dinan
[In February 2012.] I think it was Einstein who said the most amazing thing he ever observed was the power of compounding and so asset growth is compounding by definition.
James Dinan
[In February 2012.] By 1995 I was running a 100 million dollars, by 2000 I was running a billion dollars and we were running about 15 billion dollars just before the Lehman Brothers collapse.
James Dinan
[In February 2012 on what he learnt from the Lehman Brothers collapse.] I think the thing that you really learn there is at the end of the day the global financial system is built enormously on trust and it is still a very fragile one. With computerized trading… with basically global searches for liquidity, these things can happen now in incredibly fast waves.
James Dinan
[In February 2012.] I think what is really important, is you always as an investor want to be in business tomorrow. To me it’s something I learnt in 1987, and I got wiped out personally in the crash of ‘87. I was way over leveraged on my personal account and lost everything I had. So ever since then I was take care the view that you don’t use leverage even though you are running quote ‘A hedge fund.’
James Dinan
[In February 2012.] I think the big lesson in Lehman Brothers is to recognize in crisis’s all asset classes become correlated. There is no such thing as having diversified, non-correlated portfolio’s. There you want to have hedges and you want to be liquid. Liquidity is really worth the premium that I think investors attach to it.
James Dinan
[In February 2012.] We really want to have investors who are going to have a similar time-frame to what we have.
James Dinan
[In February 2012 on an important question investors ask.] How much of your own money in invested with me? At York myself and my partners have just short of a billion dollars of our own capital invested dollar for dollar alongside our investors money. What that means is we feel the pain… We have skin in the game.
James Dinan
[In February 2012.] Bloomberg is a global company. There’s Bloomberg terminals all over the world.
James Dinan
[In February 2012.] I look at Brazil and I think you’re looking at the United States in the 1950’s.
James Dinan
[In February 2012.] I not supposed to talk religion and politics. I learnt this from my mother about 50 years ago. But I’m a big believer in open immigration.
James Dinan
[In February 2012.] Be careful what you wish for.
James Dinan
[In February 2012.] We think the thing to worry about China is less the hard landing, but more inflation.
James Dinan
[In February 2012.] I think Europe has real structural issues.
James Dinan
[In February 2012.] Most businesses don’t make it… You don’t want to kill the golden goose which is basically the entrepreneurial spirit of new businesses which is real job creation.
James Dinan
[In February 2012 on the giving pledge.] I have not signed on. But I actually do agree with the principle. In my lifetime I will basically honor that principle. I think it’s a great symbol that shows what makes America – America.
James Dinan
[In February 2012.] I grew up in a middle class environment. Money was very tight. I think you never really escape your past to some extent. Most people I think would be surprised when I tell them when I go to a restaurant I look at the price of what things cost. Basically I often order based on what the price is. If the steak is X and the chicken is half that… I still look at prices.
James Dinan
[In February 2012.] I think you just have to have your own moral compass – your own true compass and basically follow that.
James Dinan
[In February 2012.] Possession’s don’t bring anybody happiness and most people don’t believe it until you experience it. Your possessions in many ways can become burdens.
James Dinan
[In December 2012.] We've collaborated with Arden for a long time and were impressed by the seamless structure and process the firm developed.
James Dinan
[In March 2014 about the tech bubble.] The last thing we want to be is the proverbial investor being carried out on the stretcher.
James Dinan
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