Quotes on Decisions

There are no perfect one-decision answers to investment success.

All investment decision-making systems are a compromise.

Investors are right and wrong all the time for the wrong reasons.

If I had to name one factor that dominates human bad decisions, it would be what I call denial.

It is not the market that is rising or falling at any moment, even if we commonly speak as though it were. In truth, prices move in response to the buying and selling decisions of countless investors, who are constantly considering the likely decisions of countless others.

Risk management means protecting oneself from the adverse and unexpected decisions others may make and, in the process, making better decisions than they do.

I’m a very blocking and tackling kind of a thinker. I just try and avoid being stupid.

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.

One lesson I have learned is to make fewer decisions. Sometimes the best thing to do is to do nothing. The hardest thing to do is to sit with cash. It is very boring.

The more decisions you make, the higher the chances are that you will make a poor decision.

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.

The only sound distinction in investment policies for one type of investor or another is based not on his financial position but on his financial competence and financial preparation.

The more irreversible the decisions, the more expensive the consequences of being wrong.

I believe the investor operates at a distinct advantage when he is aware of what path his thought process is following.

It is possible for an old, overweight ballplayer, whose legs and batting eye are gone, to tag a fastball on the nose for a pinch-hit home run, but you don't change your line-up because of it.

You need a temperament that neither derives great pleasure from being with the crowd or against the crowd because this is not a business where you take polls, it's a business where you think.

People are habitually guided by the rear-view mirror and, for the most part, by the vistas immediately behind them.

In the stock market, you don’t base your decisions on what the markets are doing, but on what you think is rational.

Investors who find an overly narrow niche to inhabit, prosper for a time but then usually stagnate. Those who move on when the world changes at least have the chance to adapt successfully.

Sometimes common sense tells us what statistics cannot.

All investors need to learn how to be at peace with their decisions.

You will be right, over the course of many transactions, if your hypotheses are correct, your facts are correct, and your reasoning is correct.

Just because we think a stock is undervalued doesn't mean we're right. We may be wrong in our judgment.

If you don't like to lose money and it affects your judgment, don't buy things that can go down a great deal.

Unless you are that rarest of birds, someone who is cool under the rapid-fire, high-pressure decision making required to maximize your returns, let others take such risks, and allow your portfolio to plug along at a slower speed. In investing, tortoises tend to win far more often than hares over the turns of the market cycle.

Few decisions in life motivated by greed ever have happy outcomes.

Faith in the long run is the most powerful force that drives investment decisions.

Consequences, not probabilities, determine the decisions that matter.

Risk in our world is nothing more than uncertainty about the decisions that other human beings are going to make and how we can best respond to those decisions.

Risk is about how we make decisions, and only incidentally about the math that we employ to reach those decisions.

A lot of great companies have made a lot of decisions you haven't heard about because they decided not to do something. Some of the best decisions they did do was to not do something.

The companies that do well, look out five, six, seven years, and some decisions they make may not be the right thing for the next year.

To lose money is the conventional penalty for bad judgment in speculation.

I've thought a lot of things when I'm managing money with great, great conviction, and a lot of times I'm wrong. And when you're betting the ranch and the circumstances change, you have to change, and that's how I've always managed money.

I do not define my job in any rigid terms but in terms of having the freedom to do what seems to me to be in the best interests of the company at any time.

We all know that the best rule for investors -- the clients of the investment business -- is, "Don't just do something -- stand there."

When it comes to long-term investing, doing "less" is often "more."

There's no such thing as superior investing without superior judgment.

Expertise is great, but it has a bad side effect. It tends to create an inability to accept new ideas.

Most financial principles and theories have a degree of good sense to them. It may be a large degree, but it never comes close to being absolute.

The problem is not whether price changes should be disregarded -- because clearly they should not be -- but rather in what way can the investor and the security analyst deal intelligently with the price changes which take place.

I believe in maximum flexibility, so I reserve the right to change my position on any subject when the external environment relating to any topic changes too.

Knowledge is only one ingredient on arriving at a stock's proper price. The other ingredient, fully as important as information is sound judgment.

There are two requirements for success in Wall Street. One, you have to think correctly; and secondly, you have to think independently.

It is very hard to think against the crowd, especially when the crowd is practically universal and unanimous in thought and emotion.