Quotes

Large losses are forever - in investing, in teenage driving, and in fidelity. If you avoid large losses with a strong defense, the winnings will have every opportunity to take care of themselves. And large losses are almost always caused by trying to get too much by taking too much risk.

Wall Street is pure economics and when profit opportunities look good, debt leverage makes them look better.

Tradition, sentiment, vague generalizations, unsubstantiated rumors, can never be made the basis of sound investment or intelligent speculation. Now and then large profits are realized on no better foundation -- merely proving that sometimes luck laughs at logic.

In a speculative market, what counts is imagination and not analysts.

The propensity to gamble is always increased by a large prize versus a small entry fee, no matter how poor the true odds may be.

I’m looking for somebody that’s got a screw loose and they define winning not by being as rich as they can be individually, but by producing great investment returns.

What we do know is that speculative episodes never come gently to an end. The wise, though for most the improbable, course is to assume the worst.

We use the term risk all too casually, and the term uncertainty all too rarely.

We deceive ourselves when we believe that past stock market return patterns provide the bounds by which we can predict the future.

I think great investors to some extent are like great chess players. They’re almost born to be investors.

Good investing requires a weird combination of patience and aggression. And not many people have it.

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.