2. Chains of habit are too light to be felt until they are too heavy to
be broken.
3. I always knew I was going to be rich. I don't think I ever doubted it
for a minute.
4. I am quite serious when I say that I do not believe there are, on the
whole earth besides, so many intensified bores as in these United
States. No man can form an adequate idea of the real meaning of the
word, without coming here.
5. I buy expensive suits. They just look cheap on me.
6. I don't have a problem with guilt about money. The way I see it is
that my money represents an enormous number of claim checks on society.
It's like I have these little pieces of paper that I can turn into
consumption. If I wanted to, I could hire 10,000 people to do nothing
but paint my picture every day for the rest of my life. And the GNP
would go up. But the utility of the product would be zilch, and I would
be keeping those 10,000 people from doing AIDS research, or teaching, or
nursing. I don't do that though. I don't use very many of those claim
checks. There's nothing material I want very much. And I'm going to give
virtually all of those claim checks to charity when my wife and I die.
7. I don't look to jump over 7-foot bars: I look around for 1-foot bars
that I can step over.
8. I never attempt to make money on the stock market. I buy on the
assumption that they could close the market the next day and not reopen
it for five years.
9. If a business does well, the stock eventually follows.
10. If past history was all there was to the game, the richest people
would be librarians.
11. If you're in the luckiest 1 per cent of humanity, you owe it to the
rest of humanity to think about the other 99 per cent.
12. In the business world, the rear view mirror is always clearer than
the windshield.
13. Investors making purchases in an overheated market need to recognize
that it may often take an extended period for the value of even an
outstanding company to catch up with the price they paid.
14. It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it.
If you think about that, you'll do things differently.
15. It's better to hang out with people better than you. Pick out
associates whose behavior is better than yours and you'll drift in that
direction.
16. It's far better to buy a wonderful company at a fair price than a
fair company at a wonderful price.
17. I've reluctantly discarded the notion of my continuing to manage the
portfolio after my death – abandoning my hope to give new meaning to the
term 'thinking outside the box.'
18. Let blockheads read what blockheads wrote.
19. Look at market fluctuations as your friend rather than your enemy;
profit from folly rather than participate in it.
20. Long ago, Sir Isaac Newton gave us three laws of motion, which were
the work of genius. But Sir Isaac's talents didn't extend to investing:
He lost a bundle in the South Sea Bubble, explaining later, 'I can
calculate the movement of the stars, but not the madness of men.' If he
had not been traumatized by this loss, Sir Isaac might well have gone on
to discover the Fourth Law of Motion: For investors as a whole, returns
decrease as motion increases
21. Most people get interested in stocks when everyone else is. The time
to get interested is when no one else is. You can't buy what is popular
and do well.
22. Never count on making a good sale. Have the purchase price be so
attractive that even a mediocre sale gives good results.
23. Of the billionaires I have known, money just brings out the basic
traits in them. If they were jerks before they had money, they are
simply jerks with a billion dollars.
24. Only buy something that you'd be perfectly happy to hold if the
market shut down for 10 years.
25. Only when the tide goes out do you discover who's been swimming naked.
26. Our favorite holding period is forever.
27. Price is what you pay. Value is what you get.
28. Risk comes from not knowing what you're doing.
29. Risk is a part of God's game, alike for men and nations.
30. Rule No.1: Never lose money. Rule No.2: Never forget rule No.1.
31. Wall Street is the only place that people ride to work in a Rolls
Royce to get advice from those who take the subway.
32. The business schools reward difficult complex behavior more than
simple behavior, but simple behavior is more effective.
33. The investor of today does not profit from yesterday's growth.
34. The line separating investment and speculation, which is never
bright and clear, becomes blurred still further when most market
participants have recently enjoyed triumphs. Nothing sedates rationality
like large doses of effortless money. After a heady experience of that
kind, normally sensible people drift into behavior akin to that of
Cinderella at the ball. They know that overstaying the festivities —
that is, continuing to speculate in companies that have gigantic
valuations relative to the cash they are likely to generate in the
future — will eventually bring on pumpkins and mice. But they
nevertheless hate to miss a single minute of what is one helluva party.
Therefore, the giddy participants all plan to leave just seconds before
midnight. There's a problem, though: They are dancing in a room in which
the clocks have no hands.
35. The only time to buy these is on a day with no "y" in it.
36. The smarter the journalists are, the better off society is. For to a
degree, people read the press to inform themselves-and the better the
teacher, the better the student body.
37. There are all kinds of businesses that Charlie and I don't
understand, but that doesn't cause us to stay up at night. It just means
we go on to the next one, and that's what the individual investor should do.
38. There seems to be some perverse human characteristic that likes to
make easy things difficult.
39. Time is the friend of the wonderful company, the enemy of the mediocre.
40. Value is what you get.
41. We believe that according the name 'investors' to institutions that
trade actively is like calling someone who repeatedly engages in
one-night stands a 'romantic.'
42. We don't get paid for activity, just for being right. As to how long
we'll wait, we'll wait indefinitely.
43. We enjoy the process far more than the proceeds.
44. We simply attempt to be fearful when others are greedy and to be
greedy only when others are fearful.
45. We've long felt that the only value of stock forecasters is to make
fortune tellers look good. Even now, Charlie and I continue to believe
that short-term market forecasts are poison and should be kept locked up
in a safe place, away from children and also from grown-ups who behave
in the market like children.
46. When a management team with a reputation for brilliance tackles a
business with a reputation for bad economics, it is the reputation of
the business that remains intact.
47. Should you find yourself in a chronically leaking boat, energy
devoted to changing vessels is likely to be more productive than energy
devoted to patching leaks.
48. Why not invest your assets in the companies you really like? As Mae
West said, "Too much of a good thing can be wonderful".
49. Wide diversification is only required when investors do not
understand what they are doing.
50. You do things when the opportunities come along. I've had periods in
my life when I've had a bundle of ideas come along, and I've had long
dry spells. If I get an idea next week, I'll do something. If not, I
won't do a damn thing.
51. You only have to do a very few things right in your life so long as
you don't do too many things wrong.
52. Your premium brand had better be delivering something special, or
it's not going to get the business
No comments:
Post a Comment