- `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’.[citation needed]
- Just as work expands to fill available time, corporate projects or acquisitions will materialize to soak up available funds… any business craving of the leader, however foolish, will be quickly supported by detailed rate-of-return and strategic studies prepared by his troops.
- Working with people who cause your stomach to churn seems much like marrying for money – probably a bad idea under any circumstances, but absolute madness if you are already rich.[citation needed]
- One of the ironies of the stock market is the emphasis on activity. Brokers, using terms such as “marketability” and “liquidity,” sing the praises of companies with high share turnover… but investors should understand that what is good for the croupier is not good for the customer. A hyperactive stock market is the pick pocket of enterprise.[citation needed]
- The speed at which a business success is recognized, furthermore, is not that important as long as the company’s intrinsic value is increasing at a satisfactory rate. In fact, delayed recognition can be an advantage: It may give us the chance to buy more of a good thing at a bargain price.[citation needed]
- The managers at fault periodically report on the lesson they have learned from the latest disappointment. They then usually seek out future lessons.[citation needed]
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.Template:Cite fix
- 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.[citation needed]
Class war
- It’s class warfare, my class is winning, but they shouldn’t be.
- CNN Interview, May 25 2005, in arguing the need to raise taxes on the rich.
- There’s class warfare, all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.
- New York Times, November 26, 2006.
Bridge
- It’s got to be the best intellectual exercise out there. You’re seeing through new situations every ten minutes…In the stock market you don’t base your decisions on what the market is doing, but on what you think is rational….Bridge is about weighing gain/loss ratios. You’re doing calculations all the time.
- Forbes. June 2, 1997.[1]
- The approach and strategies are very similar in that you gather all the information you can and then keep adding to that base of information as things develop. You do whatever the probabilities indicated based on the knowledge that you have at that time, but you are always willing to modify your behaviour or your approach as you get new information. In bridge, you behave in a way that gets the best from your partner. And in business, you behave in the way that gets the best from your managers and your employees.
- I wouldn’t mind going to jail if I had three cellmates who played bridge.
Investment
- I’ll tell you why I like the cigarette business. It costs a penny to make. Sell it for a dollar. It’s addictive. And there’s fantastic brand loyalty.
Below is the fourth installment of our “Quotes on Intelligent Investing” series. This edition focuses on investor psychology.[103]
- “Investing requires qualities of temperament way more than it requires qualities of intellect.” – Warren Buffett
- “The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool.” – Richard Feynman
- “If you feel good about buying stocks you may not be buying bargains. If you have sweaty palms then you have bargains and its time to buy.” – ArnoldVan De Berg
- “If you just do what other people do, you will get the returns other people get.” – Unknown
- “To be a value investor, you have to be willing to suffer pain.” – Jean Marie Eveillard
- “The most important thing in this business is discipline. It isn’t brains. There are so many smart, educated people in this business.” – ArnoldVan De Berg
- “If you aren’t willing to look stupid in the short run, you are not likely to be a successful investor in the long run.” – Unknown
- “The catch 22 of value investing is if you want to make an above average return, you have to be willing to buy stocks surrounded by short term pessimism and experience some pain.” – Robert Olstein
- “My best ideas have usually been lonely ideas where people I respected disagreed with me.” – Unknown
- “The hardest thing over the years has been having the courage to go against the dominant wisdom of the time to have a view that is at variance with the present consensus and bet that view. The hard part is that the investor must measure himself not by his own perceptions of his performance, but by the objective measure of the market. The market has its own reality. In an immediate emotional sense the market is always right so if you take a variant point of view you will always be bombarded for some time by conventional wisdom as expressed by the market.” – Michael Steinhardt
- “When people give away stocks based on forced selling or fear that is usually a great opportunity.” – Seth Klarman
- “Knowing what you don’t know is as important as knowing what you know.” – Unknown
- “It is always easiest to run with the herd; at times, it can take a deep reservoir of courage and conviction to stand apart from it. Yet distancing yourself from the crowd is an essential component of long-term investment success.” – Seth Klarman
Seth Klarman
“Selling, in particular, can be a challenge; many investors are tempted to become more optimistic when a security is performing well. This temptation must be resisted; tax considerations aside, when a security reaches full valuation, there is no longer a reason to own it.” – Seth Klarman[104]
“Why should the immediate opportunity set be the only one considered, when tomorrow’s may well be considerably more fertile than today’s?” – Seth Klarman[105]
“If an asset has cash flow or the likelihood of cash flow in the near term and is not purely dependment on what a future buyer might pay, then it’s an investment. If an asset’s value is totally dependent on the
