tell you about these businesses. You have to find them.”
“Intelligent investing is not complex, though that is far from saying that it is easy. What an investor needs is the ability to correctly evaluate selected businesses. Note that word “selected”: You don’t have to be an expert on every company, or even many. You only have to be able to evaluate companies within your circle of competence. The size of that circle is not very important; knowing its boundaries, however, is vital.” – Warren Buffett
“Having great clients is the key to investment success.” – Seth Klarman[24]
“Rationalism crashes in the tails.” – N.N. Taleb[25]
“It is easier to rationalize than it is to be rational.” – unknown
“[Todd Combs is] one of those rare people in finance who just really enjoys the process. He really wants to find the truth, and what is the value of a company. He’s not a person who wants to delegate that to someone else or not do his own work…He just really loves what he does.” – Charles A. Davis
“The plural of ‘anecdote’ is not data.” – Ben Goldacre
“It’s not whether you’re right or wrong that’s important, but how much money you make when you’re right and how much you lose when you’re wrong.” – George Soros
“The one thing I will tell you is the worst investment you can have is cash. Everybody is talking about cash being king and all that sort of thing. Cash is going to become worth less over time. But good businesses are going to become worth more over time. And you don’t want to pay too much for them so you have to have some discipline about what you pay. But the thing to do is find a good business and stick with it. We always keep enough cash around so I feel very comfortable and don’t worry about sleeping at night. But it’s not because I like cash as an investment. Cash is a bad investment over time. But you always want to have enough so that nobody else can determine your future essentially.” – Warren Buffett
“The central idea in The Black Swan is that: rare events cannot be estimated from empirical observation since they are rare.” – N.N. Taleb[26] [emphasis original]
“You will be right, over the course of many transactions, if your hypotheses are correct, your facts are correct, and your reasoning is correct. True conservatism is only possible through knowledge and reason.” – Warren Buffett
“Face up to two unpleasant facts: 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.”[27] – Warren Buffett
“…although I do not suppose that either of us knows anything really beautiful and good, I am better off than he is, for he knows nothing, and thinks that he knows. I neither know nor think that I know. In this latter particular, then, I seem to have slightly the advantage of him.” – Socrates
“I stopped wasting time on what [other] people claimed a stock was worth and started looking at the numbers.” – Irving Kahn[28]
“This may surprise you, but there were a large number of valuable buys during the Depression.” – Irving Kahn[29]
“With each investment you make, you should have the courage and the conviction to place at least 10 percent of your net worth in that stock.” – Warren Buffett
“I would rather lose half of our clients than half of our clients’ money.” – Jean Marie Eveillard
“Ick investing means taking a special analytical interest in stocks that inspire a first reaction of ‘ick.’” – Mike Burry, Scion Capital
“I hated discussing ideas with investors, because then I become a Defender of the Idea, and that influences your thought process.” – Mike Burry
“We don’t have to be smarter than the rest. We have to be more disciplined than the rest.” – Warren Buffett
“Typically…his way of thinking is that there are disqualifying features to an investment. So he rifles through and as soon as you hit one of those it’s done. Doesn’t like the CEO, forget it. Too much tail risk, forget it. Low-margin business, forget it. Many people would try to see whether a balance of other factors made up for these things. He doesn’t analyze from A to Z; it’s a time-waster.” – Alice Schroeder on Warren Buffett and his decision-making process[30]
“Go for a business that any idiot can run, because sooner or later any idiot probably is going to run it.” – Peter Lynch
If it’s growing like a weed, it might be a weed. – Unknown
“Hard work, honesty, if you keep at it, will get you almost anything.” – Charles Munger
“You know, you never get the high and you never get the low.” – Walter Schloss
“The person who turns over the most rocks wins the game.” – Peter Lynch
“Never confuse genius with a bull market.” – Various
“Organized common (or uncommon) sense is an enormously powerful tool. There are huge dangers with computers. People calculate too much and think too little.” – Charlie Munger
“Don’t pass up something that’s attractive today because you think you will find something way more attractive tomorrow.” – Warren Buffett[31]
“It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it. If you think about that, you’ll do things differently.” -Warren Buffett
“Cash combined with courage in a time of crisis is priceless.” – Warren Buffett
“The lesson of Buffet is, to succeed in a spectacular fashion you have to be spectacularly unusual.” – paraphrasing Mike Burry
“You don’t have to be the smartest analyst, you just have to be the most dogged.” – paraphrasing Michael Burry
“Read every line item until you get it.” – paraphrasing Michael Burry
“I don’t believe anything unless I understand it inside out. And even if I understand something, it is not uncommon that I disagree with accepted view (even if it’s a Nobel laureate).” – Mike Burry
“I have always believed that a single talented analyst, working very hard, can cover an amazing amount of investment landscape, and this belief remains unchallenged in my mind.” – Mike Burry
“The key to investing is not assessing how much an industry is going to affect society, or how much it will grow, but rather determining the competitive advantage of any given company and, above all, the durability of that advantage.” – Warren Buffett[32]
“Money managers have to account for their actions to their shareholders, which means they have an undue fear of underperformance. We invest only our own money. Our investments are driven by optimism, not fear.” – Richard Chandler[33]
“If you are invested in big companies in big countries, that means there is a ready audience of benchmark-following investors who must buy the asset.” – Rich Chandler[34]
“By buying big – going narrow and deep, as opposed to a diversifying – you maximize your successes.” – Richard Chandler[35] [Note: in growing $10 million into $5 billion over 20 years, a mere five investments have been responsible for 90% of the gains.]
“We like investments where the risk is time, not price.” – Richard Chandler[36]
“We’re just very much a plain-vanilla, long-only investment fund.” – Richard Chandler, noting that Sovereign Global Investment has averaged leverage of less than 1% of assets since 1990 and has not borrowed at all since 1998, enabling the Chandlers“to take a very long-term view of risky markets, their key competitive advantage at a time when many investors, particularly highly leverage hedge funds, invest with a short-term horizon.
