Education And Smarts

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Education And Smarts by Investment Master Class

“We start with some good news about your education: simply put, if your goal is to beat the market, an MBA or a PhD from a top business school will be of virtually no help.  Well, it’s good news, that is, if you havn’t squandered tons of money and time at a business school in the single-minded quest for stock market success.” Joel Greenblatt

“I am not putting down the study of economics, business cycles, and even security analysis.  But knowing them does not guarantee success, and if you haven’t a clue about them, there may be hope for you yet”  Adam Smith, The Money Game

“Just as many smart people fail in the investment business as stupid ones. Intellectually active people are particularly attracted to elegant concepts, which can have the effect of distracting them from simpler, more fundamental truths.” Peter Cundill

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Education And Smarts - Quotes From Munger, Buffett And More

"If calculus were required, I'd have to go back to delivering papers" Warren Buffett

“Neither my father or my grandfather believed that a degree was necessary, or even useful, in the investment business” Chris Davis

“I spent 10 minutes with the Harvard alumnus who was doing the interview, and he assessed my capabilities and turned me down.” Warren Buffett

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“I don’t think those people who have very special records in the stock markets are necessarily brighter or have more cerebral abilities than the next person.  I think it’s a matter of competitive intensities, understanding one's role, understanding it wasn’t a matter of building a business and having an organisation but achieving the best return on your investors capital.  It’s an internalised drive that’s both competitive and to some degree intellectual that combines all that with the ability to take risk and be comforted by risk. I used to kiddingly say, I liked to watch the moving parts and the moving parts were the stocks that went up and down”  Michael Steinhardt

"To this day, I have never taken any course, anywhere, in chemistry, economics, psychology, or business" Charlie Munger

"I never received a college diploma or a business school degree, but in my youth, in my years in Paris, and ever since, I have been studying constantly.  I study people, I study life, I look and listen and read,  I have never found learning about anything a waste of time.  Everything I ever learned has helped me on Wall Street" Roy Neuberger

“I was convinced picking stocks was something any kid could do, and I tried to make it fun and keep it simple. The math part – accounting and spreadsheets – I figured that I could learn later”  Shelby Davis Jnr

"The business schools reward difficult complex behaviour more than simple behaviour, but simple behaviour is more effective" Warren Buffett

"The first thing I'd say very clearly, I'm no genius. I was not in the top 10 precent of my high school class. My SATs were so mediocre I went to Bowdoin because it was the only good school that didn't require SAT's and it turned out to be a very fortunate event for me" Stanley Druckenmiller

"I did not do particularly well in school, I am easily distracted, and I have always been forgetful - not the list of personality traits likely to appear in a help-wanted ad for any profession"  Leon Levy

“I was a very ordinary kid, and a less than ordinary student” Ray Dalio

"I think people who go straight to college where they major in business and then rush out to the trading world often lack the needed judgement and intellectual curiosity.  Sometimes people who have studied more broadly end up being terrific investors with a lot more perspective and ideally a value system that reinforces that"  Josh Friedman

“A history degree is far more useful than a CFA [Chartered Financial Analyst].” Crispin Odey

"Current finance classes can help you do average" Warren Buffett

"You may have noticed students who just try to remember and pound back what is remembered. Well, they fail in school and in life. You've got to hang experience on a latticework of models in your head." Charlie Munger

"Most of the top-ranked business schools around the world do not understand the fundamentals of margin of safety" Mohnish Pabrai

"I think diversification and all that stuff they're teaching at business school today is probably the most misguided concept anywhere" Stanley Druckenmiller

“Unlike most people on Wall Street, I never went to business school, and I didn’t study business in college [I majored in psychology at the City College of New York and was turned down when I attempted to get into the course on advanced securities analysis]”. Leon Levy

"Everyone has the idea of owning good companies. The problem is that they have high prices in relations to assets and earnings, and that takes all of the fun out of the game. If all you needed to do is to figure out what company is better than others, everyone would make a lot of money. But that is not the case. They keep raising the prices to the point when the odds change. I always knew that, but they were teaching my colleagues that the market is so efficient that no one can beat it. I knew people in Omaha who beat the pari-mutuel system. I never went near a business school, so my mind wasn’t polluted by this craziness. People are trying to be smart—all I am trying to do is not to be idiotic, but it’s harder than most people think.” Charlie Munger

“Everyone has the brainpower to follow the stock market. If you made it through fifth-grade math, you can do it.”   Peter Lynch

“Being open-minded is far more important than being bright or smart” Ray Dalio

"I sometimes ask myself, ‘If you had the choice between either Oxford/HBS and the education that you get around Warren Buffett, Charlie Munger, Ben Graham, etc.’ I think hands down Charlie Munger, Ben Graham and all of that is much better, for me at least." Guy Spier

"You don't need to be a rocket scientist. Investing is not a game where the guy with the 160 IQ beats the guy with a 130 IQ.  Rationality is essential" Warren Buffett

"Investing is not rocket science. Temperament and understanding predictably irrational human nature is likely more important than raw intelligence. It’s a great relief to know I don’t have to be a Stephen Hawking to rise above the tyranny of the crowd. The lone wolf can accomplish the unexpected if he keeps his wits while those around him are losing theirs."  Frank Martin

“Despite the number of actual “rocket scientists” who have flocked to the investment business, securities prices aren’t subject to Newtonian principles, only behavioural ones” Seth Klarman

"Investing certainly requires that we 'do math' .. but's its not rocket science" Christopher Parvese

"At the end of the day, investing is not rocket science.  Productivity and dedication can be much more important differentiators than raw brain power.  Intelligence helps, but whether your driving a Porsche or Ferrari doesn't matter too much if the speed limit is 65MPH" Lee Ainslee

"Value investing requires more effort than brains, and a lot of patience.  It is more grunt work than rocket science.. It merely requires understanding a few sound principles that anyone with an average IQ can master" Chris Browne

"I don't even know how to calculate beta, and one of my unfortunate trajectories in life is that I never got to go to business school.  I never got to learn how to calculate all the Greek letters, beta included" Mohnish Pabrai

"I hated, hated school. I really hated school. I hated school generally, because it was this instruction-following thing. No. I bet you it's probably also because I wasn't good at it. I mean I suspect I wasn't good at it." Ray Dalio

"A lot of people with high IQs are terrible investors because they’ve got terrible temperaments. That is why we say that having a certain kind of temperament is more important than brains. You need to keep raw irrational emotion under control.”  Charlie Munger

"In terms of IQ, probably the best investors fall somewhere above the bottom ten percent but also below the top three percent.  The true geniuses, it seems to me, get too enamoured of theoretical cogitations and are forever betrayed by the actual behaviour of stocks, which is more simple minded than they can imagine" Peter Lynch

"There is convincing evidence that a PhD in economics or finance causes people to build vastly more fragile portfolios"  Nassim Nicholas Taleb

"The conformist is not born. He is made. I believe the brainwashing process begins in the schools and colleges" J P Getty

"I believe that our society's "mistakephobia" is crippling, a problem that begins in most elementary schools, where we learn to learn what we are taught rather than to form our own goals and to figure out how to achieve them.  We are fed with facts and tested and those who make the fewest mistakes are considered to be the smart ones, so we learn it is embarrassing to not know and to make mistakes.  Our education system spends virtually no time on how to learn from mistakes, yet this is critical to real learning.  As a result, school typically doesn't prepare young people for real life - unless their lives are spent following instructions and pleasing others.  In my opinion, that's why so many students who succeed in school fail in life" Ray Dalio

“I went to public schools and knew that I was unlikely ever to be able to get into an Ivy League college” Marty Whitman

"I returned to Wharton for my second year of graduate school more skeptical than ever about the value of academic stock-market theory.   It seemed to me that most of what I learned at Wharton, which was supposed to help you succeed in the investment business, could only help you fail.  I studied statistics, advanced calculus, and quantitative analysis.  Quantitative analysts taught me that the things I saw happening at Fidelity couldn't really be happening"  Peter Lynch

"Our experience with newly-minted MBA's has not been that great.  Their academic records always look terrific and the candidates always know just what to say; but too often they are short on personal commitment to the company and general business savvy.  It's difficult to teach a new dog old tricks"  Warren Buffett

“This skill is not something that they teach in business school.”  Paul Tudor Jones

“At a lot of business schools they teach a lot of nonsense called risk-adjusted returns and diversification"  Stanley Druckenmiller

"I wasn't the best student in college, and I don't have an MBA"  Dan Loeb

"I hated school because I liked to daydream and the system tried to stop me from that" Nassim Nicholas Taleb

"We're not talking about brain surgery here. This is finance -- add, subtract, multiply, and divide" Stephen Shwarzman

"In my life there are not that many questions I can’t properly deal with using my $40 adding machine and dog-eared compound interest table" Charlie Munger

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"Unencumbered by the received wisdom of a business education, I had to figure things out for myself.  If you think things through for yourself, you may waste some time, you also may stumble onto something that has been ignored or disregarded.  Doing so has enabled me to look at the financial world with fresh eyes"  Leon Levy

"In this business, it's not about sheer brain power, SAT scores, or an MBA from a leading business school. Those factors help and of course are nice to have, but they do not guarantee success by any stretch"  Alex Sacerdote

"To invest successfully, you need not understand beta, efficient markets, modern portfolio theory, option pricing, or emerging markets.  You may, in fact, be better off knowing nothing of these.  That, of course is not the prevailing view at most business schools, whose finance curriculum tends to be dominated by such subjects.  In out view, though, investment students need only know two well-taught courses - How to Value a Business, and How to Think About Markets" Warren Buffett

"With no disrespect to your school or mine, it probably mattered less about which school we chose and more about what we did when we got there.  Whether someone goes to Columbia, Harvard, Chicago or wherever, is not the most important factor.  If you go to a good school, you will get out of it what you put into it." Larry Robbins

"Would-be investors can take courses in finance and accounting, read widely and, if they are fortunate, receive mentoring from someone with a deep understanding of the investment process.  But only a few of them will achieve the superior insight, intuition, sense of value and awareness of psychology that are required for consistently above-average results.  Doing so requires second level thinking" Howard Marks

"I think to some extent, before you're going to be a great stock picker, you need some general education" Charlie Munger

"I always think emotional control during periods of extreme is really the most important thing. If it was all about IQ points, then every Mensa member would be a billionaire, but it doesn’t work that way. The ability to separate out market price volatility from a conclusion about the underlying company is fairly rare, even for professionals who have been in the game for a long, long time." Larry Pitkowsky

"I used to think being great at investing long-term was about genius...Genius is still good, but more and more I think it's about doing something reasonable, that makes sense, and then sticking to it with incredible fortitude through the tough times." Cliff Asness

"The good news is that you don’t need to be a genius to do well in the stock market" Francois Rochon

“I get flack for saying [when I visit a college and give a speech], “This is a nice college, but the really great educator is McDonald’s.” They hate me for saying this and think I’m a slimy creature. But McDonald’s hires people with bad work habits, trains them, and teaches them to come to work on time and have good work habits. I think a lot of what goes on there is better than at Harvard.” Charlie Munger

"You can make a lot more money by making more phone calls than everyone else than you can by just being brilliant"  Josh Friedman

“I would say that journalism was the single most important element of my development as a trader and as a businessman, more so than any of the economics classes I took at the University of Virginia.  Newspaper journalism teaches you how to fact find, analyse, and condense a story down to its most essential points and then to communicate those in a series of paragraphs that read from the most important to the least important” Paul Tudor Jones

"The most useful and practical part of psychology—which I personally think can be taught to any intelligent person in a week—is ungodly important. And nobody taught it to me by the way. I had to learn it later in life, one piece at a time. And it was fairly laborious. It's so elementary though that, when it was all over, I felt like a fool.  And yeah, I'd been educated at Cal Tech and the Harvard Law School and so forth. So very eminent places miseducated people like you and me." Charlie Munger

“I’m definitely not a financial genius, my mathematics are really poor.  I hardly know how to multiply.  What I did best, which was a sort of surprise to me,  was putting teams of great people together.  Finding great people, incentivizing them, working together with them, giving them  a chance to shine and enabling them.  That’s the most important thing, and dreaming big with them.  It wasn’t something I knew, I was basically a tennis player and a surfer” Jorge Paulo Lehman, 3G

"You need to have a passionate interest in why things are happening.  That cast of mind, kept over long periods, gradually improves your ability to focus on reality.  If you don't have that cast of mind, you're destined for failure even if you have a high I.Q" Charlie Munger

"At City College, the only course in which I ever got an A+ was abnormal psychology.  What better preparation could there be to tackle the role of psychology in markets?" Leon Levy

"My situation was, I did terribly in high school.  I hated high school.  I just wouldn't study.  I would remember that my mother would send me to my room and say, "You have to study," and I wouldn't study. I would do anything, I would be alone in the room.  I would find something to think about or do and I wouldn't study, and I did terrible in high school.  I barely got into college" Ray Dalio

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"I think business schools have taught students a lot of nonsense about investments"  Warren Buffett

"Now I'm sure I learned plenty at Oxford and Harvard Business School, but I don't think they helped me much professionally.  I'm sure I'm a better human being but they did not help me with investing"  Guy Spier

“This is ostensibly coming from a guy who ostensibly went to a trade school…..   I’m a big believer in liberal arts education.  I find it’s those English courses, sociology courses, those art-history classes, that if you were lucky enough to have taken they stay with you more.  That’s more universal knowledge.  You want to be a master of many talents.  ” James Dinan

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