Quotes on Value Investing

The thing about buying depressed stocks is that you really have three strings to your bow: 1) earnings will improve and the stocks will go up; 2) someone will come in and buy control of the company; or 3) the company will start buying its own stock and ask for tenders.

If a stock goes up 30 or 40 times in ten years, it has to have been grossly underpriced to begin with.

Almost every value trap is the result of people extrapolating past returns on capital and past valuations onto a different situation today.

Some might see buying and creating value from others’ mistakes as a form of exploitation, but I see it as giving neglected or devalued assets, in any industry, new life.

People have always made money by taking advantage of inefficient markets.

Opportunity arises when the gap between reality and perception becomes significant.

Maybe it makes me old-fashioned, but investing to me is about owning great companies for many, many years.

Establishing and maintaining an unconventional investment profile requires acceptance of uncomfortably idiosyncratic portfolios which frequently appear downright imprudent in the eyes of conventional wisdom.

I believe it is highly possible to improve your long-term results by adjusting your investment position at the extremes of the cycle. Not that often. But at the extremes.

Smart investing doesn't consist of buying good assets, but of buying assets well.

The man who is sure improvement is coming can buy on the basis of current less favorable conditions, and thus derive the full benefit of the betterment -- if it materializes.

It is important to make sure that one is not lured by rash enthusiasm into commitments at levels greatly above those soundly warranted by the financial set-up and the earnings record.

Whether you're investing in art or in securities, no one should confuse value and price.

Value investing does not appeal to the masses. If it did, you would never be able to buy a bargain.

Most of the people who have accumulated the greatest wealth in this business have done so not by predicting the future, but by buying companies at such attractive prices, thereby discounting the majority of the problems people fear.

Value investing is a way of life. I apply it to everything I do. It’s not just stock markets.

For most investors in general, selling the expensive asset, and buying the cheap asset, seems like a logical strategy -- except when you actually try to do it. Because most people are actually not wired to be selling what's expensive and going up, and buying what's cheap and going down.

If you have a valuation discipline, then you know that stock prices change more rapidly than business value. You also know that rising stock prices mean lower future rates of return and falling stock prices mean higher rates of return.

It's not what you buy, it's what you pay. And success in investing doesn't come from buying good things, but from buying things well. And if you don't know the difference, you're in the wrong business.

Growth stock investing may be more a philosophy of buying what is popular. Value investing is more a philosophy of buying what is out of favor.

Historically, many companies that have had terrible times have come back, or many of them do. A decline doesn't mean it's the end.

If you talk to a businessman, a businessman is going to feed the winners and kill the losers. But in the investment world, when you've got a winner you should be suspicious about what's next. And if you've got a loser, you should be hopeful -- although not naively hopeful.

We think diversification is only a surrogate, and usually a poor surrogate, for knowledge, control, and price consciousness.

We get protection by being price-conscious and by being extremely knowledgeable about our holdings.

We don’t pay attention to quarterly earnings or consensus forecasts. That’s performance investing, not value investing.

I learned how to work on what's cheap. I became a total believer. To this day I think that is the only way to invest.

I have learned that the great opportunities are the places that have been neglected, where other people are not looking.

All successful investment involves trying to get into something where it’s worth more than you’re paying.

There will be bear markets about twice every 10 years and recessions about twice every 10 or 12 years but nobody has been able to predict them reliably. So the best thing to do is to buy when shares are thoroughly depressed and that means when other people are selling.

Even the world's greatest business is not a good investment if the price is too high.

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.

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.

It is easy, of course, to pick out good companies, companies that are better than other companies. But that is not the same thing as picking out good stocks to buy at their current prices.

In investing, nothing beats the discovery of an undervalued stock, no matter what the nature of its business or the past trend of its earnings.

I make no attempt to forecast the general market -- my efforts are devoted to finding undervalued securities.

I would rather sustain the penalties resulting from over-conservatism than face the consequences of error, perhaps with permanent capital loss, resulting from the adoption of a "New Era" philosophy where trees really do grow to the sky.

Never count on making a good sale. Have the purchase price be so attractive that even a mediocre sale gives good results. The better sales will be the frosting on the cake.

The availability of a quotation for your business interest (stock) should always be an asset to be utilized if desired. If it gets silly enough in either direction, you take advantage of it. Its availability should never be turned into a liability whereby its periodic aberrations, in turn, formulate your judgments.

I am willing to trade the pains (forget about the pleasures) of substantial short term variance in exchange for maximization of long term performance. However, I am not willing to incur risk of substantial permanent capital loss in seeking to better long term performance.

I will not abandon a previous approach whose logic I understand even though it may mean foregoing large and apparently easy, profits to embrace an approach which I don’t fully understand, have not practiced successfully and which, possibly, could lead to substantial permanent loss of capital.

Price is what you pay. Value is what you get.

Market prices for stocks fluctuate at great amplitudes around intrinsic value but, over the long term, intrinsic value is virtually always reflected at some point in market price.

Suppose you bought a stock cheap when it was a relatively obscure situation, and then a half-dozen Wall Street firms started cheering for the stock at the same time. I'd get concerned and think about selling. I don't like bandwagons. I'd rather do my own thing.

We don't invest for income. If you invest soundly for growth, the income follows.

I have a very simple strategy. I buy good companies at attractive prices. Then I sit on them.

Uncertainty actually is the friend of the buyer of long-term values.

The greater the potential reward in a value portfolio, the less risk there is.

It is extraordinary to me that the idea of buying dollar bills for 40 cents takes immediately with people or doesn't take at all.

You’re not buying a stock, you’re buying part ownership in a business. You will do well if the business does well. And if you didn't pay a totally silly price.

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.

I think there’s a tendency in the modern world of people wanting their money to be working hard, and I joke that our money is like a couch potato by comparison.

In my opinion, the market tells you when to buy things. And when things are really cheap, on a Graham and Dodd valuation basis, you should like them more. And when they’re really expensive, you should like them less.

Discrepancies -- and hence opportunities -- in securities originate most often when events move faster than quotations.

If you think of the stock market as a cauldron of minestrone soup that occasionally somebody sticks a ladle in and stirs up, it takes a while before all the vegetables float back to the level that they were at before.

I am much more inclined to buy a stock that has been kicked out of an index because then it may have value characteristics -- it has underperformed.

The question we ask ourselves is, ''What would we be willing to pay to own a security forever?'' Then we determine whether we can buy it at a discount from that figure.

We try to buy dollars for 50 cents, and to realize the dollar before too much time passes.

It turns out that value investing is something that is in your blood. There are people who just don’t have the patience and discipline to do it, and there are people who do. So it leads me to think it’s genetic.

My experience is that when people want to give something away at a ridiculous price because they have to, not because they want to, that's a good time to buy.

Value investing is, at its core, the marriage of a contrarian streak and a calculator.

Risk is not inherent in an investment; it is always relative to the price paid.

Investors must never mistake an investment that is down in price for one that is bargain-priced; undervaluation is determined only by a security's price compared to its underlying value.

We consider for each of our investments not only whether a security is undervalued but why it is undervalued. If the reason is that there are uninformed or emotional sellers, we become more comfortable.

It is only in a bear market that the value investing discipline becomes especially important because value investing, virtually alone among strategies, gives you exposure to the upside with limited downside risk.

The main underlying principle of value investing is that you should invest in undervalued securities because they alone offer a margin of safety.

Value investors thrive not by incurring high risk (as financial theory would suggest), but by deliberately avoiding or hedging the risks they identify.

Value to some extent is in the eye of the beholder. It is very hard to pin down what the value of a future set of cash flows from a business, be it cable TV or biotechnology, is going to be.

If the market's going wild and you want to be in it, you either have to lower your standards to stay in the game or you buy stuff which may not participate because it's not part of the game at that time.

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

The general state of business thus does not forecast the course of stock prices except in the apparently paradoxical fashion that great prosperity affords an advantageous time for selling stocks, extreme business depression an opportunity for purchase.

Don't buy "cheap" stocks just because they're cheap. Buy them because the fundamentals are improving.

A correction is a wonderful opportunity to buy your favorite companies at a bargain price.

As soon as you realize you can afford to wait out any correction, the calamity also becomes an opportunity to pick up bargains.

The first task of the bargain hunter is to narrow the field and separate the solid prospects from the ones that are counting on hopes, prayers, and miracles.

I've found that when the market's going down and you buy funds wisely, at some point in the future you will be happy.

The road to success in speculation is the study of values.

See the investment world as an ocean and buy where you get the most value for your money.

I never in all my life bought a stock because I liked it. I bought it because it was a cheaper bargain than any similar stock I would buy anywhere in the rest of the world.

There's no asset so good that it can't be overpriced and become a bad investment, and very few assets are so bad they can't be underpriced and be a good investment.

You have to buy an asset at a price that is attractive and reasonable for its value.

If you can invest your money under fair conditions, in fact under attractive specific conditions, I think one certainly should do so even if the market should go down further and even if the securities you buy may also go down after you buy them.

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.

We want to get more earnings for the price we're paying.

Let us define the speculator as one who seeks to profit from market movements, without primary regard to intrinsic values; the "prudent stock investor" as one who (a) buys only at prices amply supported by underlying value, and (b) who determinedly reduces his stock holdings when the market enters the speculative phase of a sustained advance.

The only significance of stock market gyrations to the true investor is that they give him an opportunity to buy good common stocks when they are cheap -- or at least reasonably priced -- and at times offer him an invitation to sell out at temptingly high levels.

The only thing you can be sure of is that there are times when large numbers of stocks are priced too high and other times when they're priced too low.

The value approach has been founded on the premise that in many -- but by no means in all -- cases a dependable range of valuation can be established for a common stock by analytical techniques; that often this range differs substantially from the current price; and that such differences offer rewarding opportunities for investment operations.

I am an exponent of the philosophy that the main objective of common stock investment should be pricing, not timing; and by pricing I mean the endeavor to buy securities at prices which are attractive, letting timing take care of itself.

I think the future of equities will be roughly the same as their past; in particular, common stock purchases will prove satisfactory when made at appropriate price levels.

All my experience goes to show that most investment advisers take their opinions and measures of stock values from stock prices. In the stock market, value standards do not determine prices; prices determine value standards.

Let us define the speculator as one who seeks to profit from market movements, without primary regard to intrinsic value; the prudent stock investor as one who (a) buys only at prices amply supported by underlying value, and (b) who determinedly reduces his stock holdings when the market enters the speculative phase of a sustained advance.

We just try to buy cheap stocks. That's really all. We try to buy things that are out of favor - stocks that others don't want.

Lots of times when you buy a cheap stock for one reason, that reason doesn't pan out but another reason does because it's cheap.

Price is the essential determinant in every investment equation. At some price, every company is a buy; at some price, every company is a hold; and at a still higher price, every company is a sell. We do not really recognize the concept of a value company.

It's good to buy a large company with fine businesses when the price is beaten down over worry about one problem.

The market's very emotional but over time, doing something logical and systematic does work. The market eventually gets it right.

The secret to successful investing is relatively simple: Figure out the value of something and then pay a lot less.

There's no such thing as a good idea or bad idea in the investment world. It's a good idea at a price, it's a bad idea at a price.

There's good assets and bad assets but good prices and bad prices supersede whether the assets are good or bad.

We know from experience that eventually the market catches up with value. It realizes it in one way or another.

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.

I buy when things are low and no one wants them. I keep them until they go up and people are crazy to get them.

There is no great secret in fortune making. All you have to do is to buy cheap and sell dear, act with thrift and shrewdness and then be persistent.

I don't believe all this nonsense about market timing. Just buy very good value and when the market is ready that value will be recognized.

It's absolute cockamamie crazy to sell stocks after they drop. Instead, you should say, "Today there's a first-rate bargain and I'm buying."

I think that the future of equity investment, when it is made at a reasonable price, is a promising one, and one that deserves the confidence of those interested in the investment field.

Sound common stocks, bought at sound prices, are always good investments.