I think you should try and make your money in this world by selling other people things that are good for them. If you’re selling them gambling services where you rake profits off of the top, like many of these new brokers who specialize in luring the gamblers in, I think it’s a dirty way to make money and I think that we’re crazy to allow it.
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I figure that I want to swim as well as I can against the tides. I’m not trying to predict the tides.
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If I had to name one factor that dominates human bad decisions, it would be what I call denial.
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I think I’m pretty good at long run expectations, but I don’t think I’m good at short-term wobbles. I don’t have the faintest idea what’s going to happen short term.
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If you’re going to invest in stocks for the long term, or real estate, of course, there are going to be periods when there’s a lot of agony and other periods when there’s a boom. I think you just have to learn to live through them.
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I’m a very blocking and tackling kind of a thinker. I just try and avoid being stupid.
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All successful investment involves trying to get into something where it’s worth more than you’re paying.
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Over the long-term, big companies of America behave more like biology than they do anything else. In biology, all the individuals die and so do all the species. It’s just a question of time. And that’s pretty well what happens in the economy too.
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A lot of smart people think they’re way smarter than they are, and therefore they do worse than dumb people. And it’s very common to be utterly brilliant and think you’re way the hell smarter than you are.
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I’m a big fan of knowing the big ideas in pretty much all the disciplines — the ones that are pretty easy to assimilate — and then using those routinely in your judgments. That’s just my system.
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If you want to succeed in investments, start early and try hard and keep doing it. All success comes that way, by and large.
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It’s natural for people to think their own civilization and their own nation is better than everybody else, but everybody can’t be better than everybody else.
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I think great investors to some extent are like great chess players. They’re almost born to be investors.
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Good investing requires a weird combination of patience and aggression. And not many people have it.
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I have made bad business decisions. You can’t live a successful life without doing some difficult things that go wrong. That’s just the nature of the game.
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The single most important thing, if you want to avoid a lot of stupid errors, is knowing where you’re competent and where you aren’t. Knowing the edge of your own competency. And that’s very hard to do because the human mind naturally tries to make you think you’re way smarter than you are.
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I think the management should tell it like it is at all times and not be a big promoter of its own stock.
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I think people have the theory that any intelligent, hard-working person can get to be a great investor. I think any intelligent person can get to be pretty good as an investor and avoid certain obvious traps. But I don’t think everybody can be a great investor.
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I’m constantly making mistakes where I can, in retrospect, realize that I should have decided differently. And I think that that is inevitable because it’s difficult to be a good investor.
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The kind of executives who have a Buffet-like mindset and never get in trouble are a minority group, not a majority group.
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I think all good investing is value investing, and it’s just that some people look for values in strong companies and some look for values in weak companies, but every value investor tries to get more value than he pays for.
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I didn’t get rich by buying stocks at a high price-earnings multiple in the midst of crazy speculative booms, and I’m not going to change.
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Beating the market averages, after paying substantial costs and fees, is an against-the-odds game; yet a few people can do it, particularly those who view it as a game full of craziness with an occasional mispriced something or other.
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Understanding both the power of compound return and the difficulty getting it is the heart and soul of understanding a lot of things.
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Crooks, crazies, egomaniacs, people full of resentment, people full of self-pity, people who feel like victims, there’s a lot of things that aren’t going to work for you. Figure out what they are and then avoid them like the plague.
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A friend of mine says a good day when you’re old is when you wake up in the morning and nothing new hurts.
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I think it’s part of a life lived right that you learn how to make some lemonade out of your lemons.
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Warren and I are chicken about buying stocks on margin. There’s always a slight chance of catastrophe when you own securities pledged to others. The ideal is to borrow in a way no temporary thing can disturb you.
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If you totally divorce economics from psychology, you’ve gone a long way toward divorcing it from reality.
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Understanding both the power of compound return and the difficulty getting it is the heart and soul of understanding a lot of things.
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Beating the market averages, after paying substantial costs and fees, is an against-the-odds game; yet a few people can do it, particularly those who view it as a game full of craziness with an occasional mispriced something or other.
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Perhaps the most important rule in management is “Get the incentives right.”
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The whole trick in life is to get so that your own brain doesn’t mislead you.
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If you’re going to be in this game for the long pull, which is the way to do it, you better be able to handle a 50% decline without fussing too much about it.
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If you’re capable of being reasonable, it’s a moral failure to be unreasonable when you have a capacity to be reasonable.
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My definition of being properly educated is being right, when the professor is wrong.
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The whole trick of the game is to have a few times when you know that something is better than average and invest only where you have that extra knowledge.
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Never underestimate the man who overestimates himself. These weird guys who overestimate themselves occasionally knock it right out of the park.
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Modern life creates successful bureaucracy and successful bureaucracy breeds failure and stupidity.
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My system in life is to figure out what’s really stupid and then avoid it. It doesn’t make me popular, but it prevents a lot of trouble.
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The great lesson in microeconomics is to discriminate between when technology is going to help you and when it’s going to kill you.
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It’s not given to human beings to have such talent that they can just know everything about everything all the time.
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Averaged out, betting on the quality of a business is better than betting on the quality of management. In other words, if you have to choose one, bet on the business momentum, not the brilliance of the manager.
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There are huge advantages for an individual to get into a position where you make a few great investments and just sit back. You’re paying less to brokers. You’re listening to less nonsense.
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