Success Quote by Charles A. Jaffe

Jaffe’s line works because it weaponizes two tidy nature metaphors and then snaps them in half. The whale and the turtle are classic self-help animals: visibility invites danger; progress demands exposure. In other words, you can manage risk with timing and posture. Come up only when it’s safe. Stick your neck out selectively. That’s the comforting story people want finance to tell.

Then he pivots: “but investors face risk no matter what they do.” The subtext is a rebuke to the fantasy of the risk-free stance - the idea that staying “underwater” in cash, or refusing to act until certainty arrives, is a protective default. Jaffe is pointing at the investor’s real problem: in markets, inaction isn’t neutrality; it’s a position with its own hazards (inflation erosion, missed compounding, opportunity cost, being forced to re-enter at worse prices). You don’t get to opt out of uncertainty. You only choose which uncertainty you can live with.

Contextually, the quote sounds like a veteran of late-20th-century cycles - someone who watched investors treat every downturn as an avoidable harpoon, every rally as proof they should’ve waited for “confirmation.” He’s arguing for humility rather than bravado: risk can be shaped, diversified, insured against, time-managed, but never deleted. The line lands because it denies the moralizing myth that “smart” investors simply avoid danger; it insists the adult version of investing is accepting trade-offs and paying for them knowingly.