Quotes from Warren Buffett(沃倫·巴菲特)

 

 

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Quotes from Warren Buffett(沃倫·巴菲特)

via Youth is not a time of life; it is a state of mind on 12/15/07

Source: WikiQuote

Habit

• "You only find out who is swimming naked when the tide goes out."
• "Chains of habit are too light to be felt until they are too heavy to be broken."

Price Conscious

• "Price is what you pay. Value is what you get."
• "For some reason, people take their cues from price action rather than from values. What doesn't work is when you start doing things that you don't understand or because they worked last week for somebody else. The dumbest reason in the world to buy a stock is because it's going up. "
• "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."

Circle of Competency

• "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."
  

Intelligent Decision Making

• "The fact that people will be full of greed, fear or folly is predictable. The sequence is not predictable." - Financial Review, 1985
• "I will tell you how to become rich. Close the doors. Be fearful when others are greedy. Be greedy when others are fearful."- lecturing to a group of students at Columbia U. He was 21 years old.
• "We're more comfortable in that kind of business. It means we miss a lot of very big winners. But we wouldn't know how to pick them out anyway. It also means we have very few big losers - and that's quite helpful over time. We're perfectly willing to trade away a big payoff for a certain payoff." - 1999 Berkshire Hathaway Annual Meeting
• "The most common cause of low prices is pessimism-some times pervasive, some times specific to a company or industry. We want to do business in such an (pessimistic) environment, not because we like pessimism but because we like the prices it produces. It's optimism that is the enemy of the rational buyer." - 1990 Chairman's Letter to Shareholders
• "Success in investing doesn't correlate with I.Q. once you're above the level of 25. Once you have ordinary intelligence, what you need is the temperament to control the urges that get other people into trouble in investing." - BusinessWeek Interview June 25 1999
• "Time is the enemy of the poor business and the friend of the great business. If you have a business that's earning 20%-25% on equity, time is your friend. But time is your enemy if your money is in a low return business."- 1998 Berkshire Annual Meeting
• "Ben's Mr. Market allegory may seem out-of-date in today's investment world, in which most professionals and academicians talk of efficient markets, dynamic hedging and betas. Their interest in such matters is understandable, since techniques shrouded in mystery clearly have value to the purveyor of investment advice. After all, what witch doctor has ever achieved fame and fortune by simply advising 'Take two aspirins'?"- 1987 Chairman's Letter to Shareholders

Inactivity as Intelligent

• "We don't get paid for activity, just for being right. As to how long we'll wait, we'll wait indefinitely." - 1998 Berkshire Hathaway Annual Meeting
• "I call investing the greatest business in the world because you never have to swing. You stand at the plate, the pitcher throws you General Motors at 47! U.S. Steel at 39! and nobody calls a strike on you. There's no penalty except opportunity lost. All day you wait for the pitch you like; then when the fielders are asleep, you step up and hit it."

On Diversification

• "Diversification is a protection against ignorance. It makes very little sense for those who know what they're doing."

On Margin of Safety

• "You leave yourself an enormous margin of safety. You build a bridge that 30,000-pound trucks can go across and then you drive 10,000-pound trucks across it. That is the way I like to go across bridges." - Financial World, June 13, 1984.

Efficient Market Hypothesis

• "I'd be a bum on the street with a tin cup if the markets were always efficient."

General Rules

• "Rule No.1: Never lose money. Rule No.2: Never forget rule No.1."
• "It's far better to buy a wonderful company at a fair price than a fair company at a wonderful price."
• "You're neither right nor wrong because other people agree with you. You're right because your facts are right and your reasoning is right—and that's the only thing that makes you right. And if your facts and reasoning are right, you don't have to worry about anybody else."
• "Our favourite holding period is forever." Letter to Berkshire Hathaway shareholders, 1988
• "When a management with a reputation for brilliance tackles a business with a reputation for bad economics, it is usually the reputation of the business that remains intact."
• "Risk comes from not knowing what you're doing."
• "If you don't know jewellery, know the jeweller."
• "If you don't feel comfortable owning something for 10 years, then don't own it for 10 minutes."
• "There seems to be some perverse human characteristic that likes to make easy things difficult."
• "One's objective should be to get it right, get it quick, get it out, and get it over... your problem won't improve with age."
• "A public-opinion poll is no substitute for thought."
• "If a business does well, the stock eventually follows."
• "The most important quality for an investor is temperament, not intellect... You need a temperament that neither derives great pleasure from being with the crowd or against the crowd."
• "The future is never clear, and you pay a very high price in the stock market for a cheery consensus. Uncertainty is the friend of the buyer of long-term values."
• "It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it. If you think about that, you'll do things differently."
• "Of one thing be certain: if a CEO is enthused about a particularly foolish acquisition, both his internal staff and his outside advisors will come up with whatever projections are needed to justify his stance. Only in fairy tales are emperors told that they are naked."
• When asked how he became so successful in investing, Buffett answered: "we read hundreds and hundreds of annual reports every year."
• "I never buy anything unless I can fill out on a piece of paper my reasons. I may be wrong, but I would know the answer to that. "I'm paying $32 billion today for the Coca Cola Company because..." If you can't answer that question, you shouldn't buy it. If you can answer that question, and you do it a few times, you'll make a lot of money."
• "You ought to be able to explain why you're taking the job you're taking, why you're making the investment you're making, or whatever it may be. And if it can't stand applying pencil to paper, you'd better think it through some more. And if you can't write an intelligent answer to those questions, don't do it."
• "I really like my life. I've arranged my life so that I can do what I want."
• "Someone's sitting in the shade today because someone planted a tree a long time ago."

Views of Government and Wall Street

• "Wall Street is the only place that people ride to work in a Rolls Royce to get advice from those who take the subway."
• "The Stock Market is designed to transfer money from the Active to the Patient."
• "Managers thinking about accounting issues should never forget one of Abraham Lincoln's favorite riddles: `How many legs does a dog have if you call his tail a leg?' The answer: `Four, because calling a tail a leg does not make it a leg'."

Walking Away

• "I am out of step with present conditions. When the game is no longer played your way, it is only human to say the new approach is all wrong, bound to lead to trouble, and so on. On one point, however, I am clear. I will not abandon a previous approach whose logic I understand ( although I find it difficult to apply ) 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." - in a letter to his partners in the stock market frenzy of 1969.
• "I just don't see anything available that gives any reasonable hope of delivering such a good year and I have no desire to grope around, hoping to 'get lucky' with other people's money. I am not attuned to this market environment, and I don't want to spoil a decent record by trying to play a game I don't understand just so I can go out a hero."

Bridge

• "I wouldn't mind going to jail if I had three cellmates who played bridge."

 

 

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