28 February 2016
Investing Quotes
The future is never clear. 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.
Warren Buffett
I never attempt to make money on the stock market. I buy on the assumption that they could close the market the next day and not reopen it for five years. As far as you are concerned, the stock market does not exist. Ignore it. Much success can be attributed to inactivity. Most investors cannot resist the temptation to constantly buy and sell.
Warren Buffett
Buy so well, you don’t have to sell. Don’t buy for 10 minutes.
Warren Buffett
The dumbest reason in the world to buy a stock is because it is going up.
Warren Buffett
It is not necessary to do extraordinary things to get extraordinary results.
Warren Buffett
In the short run, the market is a voting machine. In the long run, it’s a weighing machine.
Warren Buffett
The dominant retailer in one twenty-year period is not necessarily the dominant retailer in the next.
Warren Buffett
You can’t do well investing unless you think independently. And the truth is, you are neither right nor wrong because people agree with you. You’re right because your facts and reasoning are right. In the end, that’s what counts.
Warren Buffett
Speculation is most dangerous when it looks easiest.
Warren Buffett
Cash combined with courage in a crisis is priceless.
Warren Buffett
Diversification is a protection against ignorance. It makes very little sense for those who know what they are doing.
Warren Buffett
As one of the Indianapolis ‘500’ winners said: ‘To finish first you must first finish’.
Warren Buffett
The sign above the players’ entrance to the field at Notre Dame reads ‘Play like a champion today’. I sometimes joke that the sign at Nebraska reads ‘Remember your helmet’. Charlie and I are ‘Remember your helmet’ kind of guys. We like to keep it simple.
Warren Buffett
Risk comes from not knowing what you are doing.
Warren Buffett
I’d be a bum on the street with a tin cup if the markets were always efficient.
Warren Buffett
I read the first edition of this book [The Intelligent Investor] early in 1950, when I was about nineteen. I thought then it was by far the best book about investing ever written. I still think it is.
Warren Buffett
Be fearful when others are greedy, and greedy when others are fearful.
Warren Buffett
My biggest mistakes are investments I didn’t make.
Warren Buffett
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.
Warren Buffett
I have never met a man who could forecast the market.
Warren Buffett
I am a better investor because I am a businessman, and a better businessman because I am an investor.
Warren Buffett
We do not have, never have had, and never will have an opinion about where the stockmarket, interest rates, or business activity will be a year from now.
Warren Buffett
I like businesses that I know what they will look like in 5 or 10 or 20 years. I think I know what Coke will look like.
Warren Buffett
Like Warren, I had a considerable passion to get rich, not because I wanted Ferraris – I wanted the independence. I desperately wanted it.
Charlie Munger
The game of investing is one of making better predictions about the future than other people. How are you going to do that? One way is to limit your tries to areas of competence. If you try to predict the future of everything, you attempt too much. You’re going to fail through lack of specialisation.
Charlie Munger
How do you learn to be a great investor? First of all, you have to understand your own nature. Each person has to play the game given his own marginal utility considerations and in a way that takes into account his own psychology. If losses are going to make you miserable and some losses are inevitable – you might be wise to utilise a very conservative pattern of investment and savings all your life. So you have to adapt your strategy to your own nature and your own talents. I don’t think there’s a one size fits all investment strategy that I can give you.
Charlie Munger
Investors can have 90% of their wealth in a single company, if it is the right company.
Charlie Munger
But to me all intelligent investing is value investing.
Charlie Munger
Warren Buffett is a learning machine.
Charlie Munger
Sit on your ass investing. You’re paying less to brokers, you’re listening to less nonsense, and if it works, the tax system gives you an extra one, two, or three percentage points per annum.
Charlie Munger
The big money is not in the buying and selling … but in the waiting.
Charlie Munger
It takes character to sit there with all that cash and do nothing. I didn’t get to where I am by going after mediocre opportunities.
Charlie Munger
A great business at a fair price is superior to a fair business at a great price.
Charlie Munger
No wise pilot, no matter how great his talent and experience, fails to use a checklist.
Charlie Munger
Preparation. Discipline. Patience. Decisiveness.
Charlie Munger
How do some people get wiser than other people? Partly it is inborn temperament. Some people do not have a good temperament for investing. They’re too fretful; they worry too much. But if you’ve got a good temperament, which basically means being very patient, yet combine that with a vast aggression when you know enough to do something, then you just gradually learn the game, partly by doing, partly by studying. Obviously the more hard lessons you can learn vicariously, instead of from your own terrible experiences, the better off you will be. I don’t know anyone who did it with great rapidity. Warren Buffett has become one hell of a lot better investor since the day I met him, and so have I. If we had been frozen at any given stage, with the knowledge we had, the record would have been much worse than it is. So the game is to keep learning, and I don’t think people are going to keep learning who don’t like the learning process.
Charlie Munger
The idea that it is hard to find good investments, so concentrate in a few, seems to me to be an obviously good idea. But 98% of the investment world doesn’t think this way. It’s been good four us – and you – [As a Bershire shareholder] – that we’ve done this.
Charlie Munger
The idea of excessive diversification is madness. We don’t believe that widespread diversification will yield a good result. We believe almost all good investments will involve relatively low diversification. If you took our top fifteen decisions out, we’d have a pretty average record. It wasn’t hyperactivity, but a hell of a lot of patience. You stuck to your principles, and when opportunities came along, you pounced on them with vigour. Berkshire in it’s history has made money betting on sure things.
Charlie Munger
There are two types of mistakes: 1) doing nothing, what Warren calls ‘sucking my thumb’, and 2) buying with an eyedropper things we should be buying a lot of.
Charlie Munger
Really good investment opportunities aren’t going to come along too often and won’t last too long, so you’ve got to be ready to act. Have a prepared mind.
Charlie Munger
There’s always been a market for people who pretend to know the future. Listening to today’s forecasters is just as crazy as when the king hired the guy to look at the sheep guts. It happens over and over and over.
Charlie Munger
[A young shareholder asked Charlie how to follow in his footsteps, and Charlie brought down the house by saying.] We get these questions a lot from the enterprising young. It’s a very intelligent question: You look at some old guy who’s rich and you ask, ‘How can I become like you, except faster?’ Spend each day trying to be a little wiser than you were when you woke up. Discharge your duties faithfully and well. Step by step you get ahead, but not necessarily in fast spurts. But you build discipline by preparing for fast spurts… slug it out one inch at a time, day by day. At the end of the day – if you live long enough – most people get what they deserve.
Charlie Munger
I always like it when someone attractive to me agrees with me, so I have fond memories of Phil Fisher.
Charlie Munger
So what makes sense for the investor is different from what makes sense for the [Fund] manager. And, as usual in human affairs, what determines the behaviour are incentives for the decision maker.
Charlie Munger
You have to figure out where you’ve got an edge. And you’ve got to play within your own circle of competence.
Charlie Munger
When Warren lectures at business schools, he says ‘I could improve your ultimate financial welfare by giving you a ticket with only twenty slots in it so that you had twenty punches – representing all the investments that you got to make in a lifetime. And once you’d punched through the card, you couldn’t make any more investments at all. ‘ He says ‘Under those rules, you’d really think carefully about what you did, and you’d be forced to load up what you’d really thought about. So you’d do so much better.’ Again, this is a concept that seems perfectly obvious to me. And to Warren it seems perfectly obvious. But this is one of the very few business classes in the United States where anybody will be saying so. It just isn’t the conventional wisdom. To me it’s obvious that the winner has to bet selectively. It’s been obvious to me since very early in life. I don’t know why it’s not obvious to very many other people.
Charlie Munger
The successful investor is usually an individual who is inherently interested in business problems.
Philip Fisher
Doing what everyone else is doing at the moment, and therefore what you have an almost irresistible urge to do, is often the wrong thing to do at all.
Philip Fisher
Practical investors usually learn their problem is finding enough outstanding investments, rather than choosing among too many.
Philip Fisher
Usually a very long list of securities is not a sign of the brilliant investor, but of one who is unsure of himself.
Philip Fisher
All the correct reasoning in the world is of no benefit in stock investment unless it is turned into specific action.
Philip Fisher
The vast majority of stock traders are inevitably doomed to failure.
Benjamin Graham
Investment is most intelligent when it is most businesslike.
Benjamin Graham
You are neither right nor wrong because the crowd disagrees with you. You are right because your data and reasoning are right.
Benjamin Graham
To achieve satisfactory investment results is easier than most people realise; to achieve superior results is harder than it looks.
Benjamin Graham
[Buying stock in new or virtually new ventures] This we condemn unhesitatingly and with emphasis. The odds are so strongly against the man who buys into these new flotation’s that he might as well throw ¾’s of his money out of the window and keep the rest in the bank.
Benjamin Graham
No-one will take as much care with your money as you will yourself.
Bob Jones
Investment expertise can never be bought or hired. Anyone possessing such skill will use it on his own behalf for the maximum personal gain, and will not on behalf of a host of ungrateful strangers for a pittance of a salary.
Bob Jones
Any experienced investor knows only too well that when it comes to liquidity and interest rates, nothing is carved in stone. That is why, like everything in life, professional investors seek as much certainty as possible and always opt for a long-term fixed interest rate when they borrow, no matter that current forecasting may be projecting future interest rate declines. If the deal works at current rates, then only a fool would place it in the realms of uncertainty by borrowing at floating rates.
Bob Jones
Many [property investors] are migrants driven by a hunger to succeed and a self-help attitude deserving of nothing but respect.
Bob Jones
Any investor who’s been around the block will confirm that the old adage about banks being fair-weather friends is true. Banks clamour to lend money in good times, but panic when the economy turns southwards.
Bob Jones
In short, the golden rule of property investment is to buy quality and never sell.
Bob Jones
Rapid wealth from property investment stems primarily from borrowed funds and it follows that anyone capable of organising a property empire is smart enough to do it on his own behalf and not for the benefit of a lot of old lady shareholders.
Bob Jones
You should do your own investing and not let others do it for you no matter how small your beginnings. You will make far more money with far less risk.
Bob Jones
Property is a money business and when emotion intrudes the money goes right out the window.
Bob Jones
In short, I am saying stay away from undeveloped land. It will return you nothing or next to nothing on your capital and cost you rates while you wait for a miracle. If you’re lucky and the miracle occurs, chances are it could happen to coincide with the fortunately rare occasions when the voting public lose their senses and give the Labour Party a crack in office.
Bob Jones
Half a century’s experience has taught me that, profit-wise, less is more. In other word’s, do less and think more and in the process make every post a winning post.
Bob Jones
Some countries, notably in Asia, allow foreign commercial property ownership only where there is a 50 percent partnership with a local. Every account I’ve heard of where some brave soul has done this has been a tale of distress.
Bob Jones
There is no great secret in fortune making. All you do is buy cheap and sell dear, act with thrift and shrewdness and be persistent.
Hetty Green
I buy when things are low and no one wants them. I keep them until they go up, and people are crazy to get them.
Hetty Green
To quote the stock markets – suppose you buy at 16 and are offered 32… Better take the offer, I say; 32 in the hand is worth the whole arithmetic in the bush.
Hetty Green
The odds of anyone calling you on the phone with good investment advice are about the same as winning Lotto without buying a ticket.
Joel Greenblatt
Reading and studying Graham’s work is how I first became fascinated with the stock market. I still apply his teachings wherever and whenever I can.
Joel Greenblatt
[On value-oriented strategies] Though these strategies have been well documented over many years, most individual and professional investors do not have the patience to use them.
Joel Greenblatt
It might not be today or tomorrow, but if you do your homework well, the stock market will eventually recognise the inherent value that attracted you to the bargain opportunity in the first place.
Joel Greenblatt
It has never been easier to make a fortune in real estate.
Robert G Allen
How many millionaires do you know who have become wealthy by investing in savings accounts?
Robert G Allen
Real estate is a wonderful wealth generator but a terrible cashflow generator.
Robert G Allen
[On focusing on cashflow] I try to pretend that the property I buy will never appreciate in value.
Robert G Allen
Be such a powerful steward over your forest of money trees that they can produce fruit to feed generations of people long after you have gone.
Robert G Allen
Avoiding where others go wrong is an important step in achieving investment success.
Seth Klarman
Individual and institutional investors alike frequently demonstrate an inability to make long-term investment decisions based on business fundamentals.
Seth Klarman
Once you adopt a value-investment strategy, any other investment behaviour starts to seem like gambling.
Seth Klarman
When a Wall Street analyst or broker expresses optimism, investors must take it with a grain of salt.
Seth Klarman
There is a value gene. You simply get it or not.
Seth Klarman
Human nature never changes.
Seth Klarman
One risk-related consideration should be paramount above all others: the ability to sleep well at night, confident that your financial position is secure whatever the future may bring.
Seth Klarman
Many times people do not make money simply because they fear losing money more.
Robert Kiyosaki
If you are not happy while getting rich, chances are you will not be happy when you do get rich. So whether you are rich or poor, make sure you are happy.
Robert Kiyosaki
Money is a teaching tool.
Robert Kiyosaki
The more people you serve the richer you become.
Robert Kiyosaki
The questions is, ‘Can you become very good at investing in at least two different assets or asset classes? If you can, financial magic can happen.’
Robert Kiyosaki
Think like a dairy farmer (cashflow), not like a cattle rancher (capital gains).
Robert Kiyosaki
In my seminars, I am often asked, ‘Why don’t more people invest for cashflow? While I am certain there are many answers, I believe there is one primary reason… and that reason is, good cashflow at a good price is hard to find.
Robert Kiyosaki
Investing is not risky. Investing is fun. Investing can make you very very rich. More importantly investing can set you free, free from the struggle of earning a living and worrying about money.
Robert Kiyosaki
Your home is not an asset.
Robert Kiyosaki
The rich invent money.
Robert Kiyosaki
There are no limits, no ceilings, glass or otherwise, for women in the world of investing.
Kim Kiyosaki
A man is not a plan.
Kim Kiyosaki
Ultimately money buys you one of two things: It buys you slavery or it buys your freedom.
Kim Kiyosaki
Never invest in any idea you can’t illustrate with a crayon.
Peter Lynch
All else being equal, invest in the company with the fewest colour photographs in the annual report.
Peter Lynch
The thing to remember is that we’ve wiggled out of every recession since the one that turned into the Great Depression.
Peter Lynch
Good investing is boring.
George Soros
Perfect knowledge is not attainable.
George Soros
Bull markets are born in pessimism, grow on scepticism, mature on optimism and die on euphoria.
John Templeton
People are always asking me where is the outlook good, but that’s the wrong question, The right question is: Where is the outlook most miserable?
John Templeton
To buy when others are despondently selling and to sell when others are avidly buying requires the greatest of fortitude and pays the greatest ultimate rewards.
John Templeton
The time of maximum pessimism is the best time to buy, and the time of maximum optimism is the best time to sell.
John Templeton
Buy in gloom, sell in boom.
Rene Rivkin
I have never met a rich chartist.
Rene Rivkin
Never offer financial advice unless asked.
Rene Rivkin
Never offer ANY advice unless asked.
Rene Rivkin
Skepticism and pessimism aren’t synonymous. Skepticism calls for pessimism when optimism is excessive. But it also calls for optimism when pessimism is excessive.
Howard Marks
A hugely profitable investment that doesn’t begin with discomfort is usually an oxymoron.
Howard Marks
The best investment on earth is earth.
Louis Glickman
I had been trading since my fourteenth year. I had made my first thousand dollars when I was a kid of fifteen, and my first ten thousand before I was twenty-one. I had made and lost a ten thousand dollar stake more than once. In New York I had made thousands and lost them. I got up to fifty thousand dollars and two days later that went. I had no other business and knew no other game. After several years I was back where I began. No – worse, for I had acquired habits and a style of living that required money; though that part didn’t bother me as much as being wrong so consistently.
Jesse Livermore
I could improve your ultimate financial welfare by giving you a ticket with only twenty slots in it so that you had twenty punches – representing all the investments that you get to make in a lifetime. And once you’d punched through the card, you couldn’t make any more investments at all. Under those rules, you’d really think carefully about what you did, and you’d be forced to load up on what you’d really thought about. So you’d do so much better.
Warren Buffett
We don’t get paid for being busy, we get paid for being right.
Warren Buffett
I don’t know anyone who [learned to be a great investor] with great rapidity. Warren has gotten to be one hell of a lot better investor over the period I’ve know him, as have I. So the game is to keep learning. You have to like the learning process. I’ve watched Warren for decades. Warren has learned a lot, which has allowed him to [expand his circle of competence so he could invest in something like Petro China]. If you’ve going to be an investor, you’re going to make some investments where you don’t have all the experience you need. But if you keep trying to get a little better over time, you’ll start to make investments that are virtually certain to have a good outcome. The keys are discipline, hard work and practice. It’s like playing golf – you have to work on it. If you don’t keep learning, other people will pass you by.
Charlie Munger
Warren Buffett
I never attempt to make money on the stock market. I buy on the assumption that they could close the market the next day and not reopen it for five years. As far as you are concerned, the stock market does not exist. Ignore it. Much success can be attributed to inactivity. Most investors cannot resist the temptation to constantly buy and sell.
Warren Buffett
Buy so well, you don’t have to sell. Don’t buy for 10 minutes.
Warren Buffett
The dumbest reason in the world to buy a stock is because it is going up.
Warren Buffett
It is not necessary to do extraordinary things to get extraordinary results.
Warren Buffett
In the short run, the market is a voting machine. In the long run, it’s a weighing machine.
Warren Buffett
The dominant retailer in one twenty-year period is not necessarily the dominant retailer in the next.
Warren Buffett
You can’t do well investing unless you think independently. And the truth is, you are neither right nor wrong because people agree with you. You’re right because your facts and reasoning are right. In the end, that’s what counts.
Warren Buffett
Speculation is most dangerous when it looks easiest.
Warren Buffett
Cash combined with courage in a crisis is priceless.
Warren Buffett
Diversification is a protection against ignorance. It makes very little sense for those who know what they are doing.
Warren Buffett
As one of the Indianapolis ‘500’ winners said: ‘To finish first you must first finish’.
Warren Buffett
The sign above the players’ entrance to the field at Notre Dame reads ‘Play like a champion today’. I sometimes joke that the sign at Nebraska reads ‘Remember your helmet’. Charlie and I are ‘Remember your helmet’ kind of guys. We like to keep it simple.
Warren Buffett
Risk comes from not knowing what you are doing.
Warren Buffett
I’d be a bum on the street with a tin cup if the markets were always efficient.
Warren Buffett
I read the first edition of this book [The Intelligent Investor] early in 1950, when I was about nineteen. I thought then it was by far the best book about investing ever written. I still think it is.
Warren Buffett
Be fearful when others are greedy, and greedy when others are fearful.
Warren Buffett
My biggest mistakes are investments I didn’t make.
Warren Buffett
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.
Warren Buffett
I have never met a man who could forecast the market.
Warren Buffett
I am a better investor because I am a businessman, and a better businessman because I am an investor.
Warren Buffett
We do not have, never have had, and never will have an opinion about where the stockmarket, interest rates, or business activity will be a year from now.
Warren Buffett
I like businesses that I know what they will look like in 5 or 10 or 20 years. I think I know what Coke will look like.
Warren Buffett
Like Warren, I had a considerable passion to get rich, not because I wanted Ferraris – I wanted the independence. I desperately wanted it.
Charlie Munger
The game of investing is one of making better predictions about the future than other people. How are you going to do that? One way is to limit your tries to areas of competence. If you try to predict the future of everything, you attempt too much. You’re going to fail through lack of specialisation.
Charlie Munger
How do you learn to be a great investor? First of all, you have to understand your own nature. Each person has to play the game given his own marginal utility considerations and in a way that takes into account his own psychology. If losses are going to make you miserable and some losses are inevitable – you might be wise to utilise a very conservative pattern of investment and savings all your life. So you have to adapt your strategy to your own nature and your own talents. I don’t think there’s a one size fits all investment strategy that I can give you.
Charlie Munger
Investors can have 90% of their wealth in a single company, if it is the right company.
Charlie Munger
But to me all intelligent investing is value investing.
Charlie Munger
Warren Buffett is a learning machine.
Charlie Munger
Sit on your ass investing. You’re paying less to brokers, you’re listening to less nonsense, and if it works, the tax system gives you an extra one, two, or three percentage points per annum.
Charlie Munger
The big money is not in the buying and selling … but in the waiting.
Charlie Munger
It takes character to sit there with all that cash and do nothing. I didn’t get to where I am by going after mediocre opportunities.
Charlie Munger
A great business at a fair price is superior to a fair business at a great price.
Charlie Munger
No wise pilot, no matter how great his talent and experience, fails to use a checklist.
Charlie Munger
Preparation. Discipline. Patience. Decisiveness.
Charlie Munger
How do some people get wiser than other people? Partly it is inborn temperament. Some people do not have a good temperament for investing. They’re too fretful; they worry too much. But if you’ve got a good temperament, which basically means being very patient, yet combine that with a vast aggression when you know enough to do something, then you just gradually learn the game, partly by doing, partly by studying. Obviously the more hard lessons you can learn vicariously, instead of from your own terrible experiences, the better off you will be. I don’t know anyone who did it with great rapidity. Warren Buffett has become one hell of a lot better investor since the day I met him, and so have I. If we had been frozen at any given stage, with the knowledge we had, the record would have been much worse than it is. So the game is to keep learning, and I don’t think people are going to keep learning who don’t like the learning process.
Charlie Munger
The idea that it is hard to find good investments, so concentrate in a few, seems to me to be an obviously good idea. But 98% of the investment world doesn’t think this way. It’s been good four us – and you – [As a Bershire shareholder] – that we’ve done this.
Charlie Munger
The idea of excessive diversification is madness. We don’t believe that widespread diversification will yield a good result. We believe almost all good investments will involve relatively low diversification. If you took our top fifteen decisions out, we’d have a pretty average record. It wasn’t hyperactivity, but a hell of a lot of patience. You stuck to your principles, and when opportunities came along, you pounced on them with vigour. Berkshire in it’s history has made money betting on sure things.
Charlie Munger
There are two types of mistakes: 1) doing nothing, what Warren calls ‘sucking my thumb’, and 2) buying with an eyedropper things we should be buying a lot of.
Charlie Munger
Really good investment opportunities aren’t going to come along too often and won’t last too long, so you’ve got to be ready to act. Have a prepared mind.
Charlie Munger
There’s always been a market for people who pretend to know the future. Listening to today’s forecasters is just as crazy as when the king hired the guy to look at the sheep guts. It happens over and over and over.
Charlie Munger
[A young shareholder asked Charlie how to follow in his footsteps, and Charlie brought down the house by saying.] We get these questions a lot from the enterprising young. It’s a very intelligent question: You look at some old guy who’s rich and you ask, ‘How can I become like you, except faster?’ Spend each day trying to be a little wiser than you were when you woke up. Discharge your duties faithfully and well. Step by step you get ahead, but not necessarily in fast spurts. But you build discipline by preparing for fast spurts… slug it out one inch at a time, day by day. At the end of the day – if you live long enough – most people get what they deserve.
Charlie Munger
I always like it when someone attractive to me agrees with me, so I have fond memories of Phil Fisher.
Charlie Munger
So what makes sense for the investor is different from what makes sense for the [Fund] manager. And, as usual in human affairs, what determines the behaviour are incentives for the decision maker.
Charlie Munger
You have to figure out where you’ve got an edge. And you’ve got to play within your own circle of competence.
Charlie Munger
When Warren lectures at business schools, he says ‘I could improve your ultimate financial welfare by giving you a ticket with only twenty slots in it so that you had twenty punches – representing all the investments that you got to make in a lifetime. And once you’d punched through the card, you couldn’t make any more investments at all. ‘ He says ‘Under those rules, you’d really think carefully about what you did, and you’d be forced to load up what you’d really thought about. So you’d do so much better.’ Again, this is a concept that seems perfectly obvious to me. And to Warren it seems perfectly obvious. But this is one of the very few business classes in the United States where anybody will be saying so. It just isn’t the conventional wisdom. To me it’s obvious that the winner has to bet selectively. It’s been obvious to me since very early in life. I don’t know why it’s not obvious to very many other people.
Charlie Munger
The successful investor is usually an individual who is inherently interested in business problems.
Philip Fisher
Doing what everyone else is doing at the moment, and therefore what you have an almost irresistible urge to do, is often the wrong thing to do at all.
Philip Fisher
Practical investors usually learn their problem is finding enough outstanding investments, rather than choosing among too many.
Philip Fisher
Usually a very long list of securities is not a sign of the brilliant investor, but of one who is unsure of himself.
Philip Fisher
All the correct reasoning in the world is of no benefit in stock investment unless it is turned into specific action.
Philip Fisher
The vast majority of stock traders are inevitably doomed to failure.
Benjamin Graham
Investment is most intelligent when it is most businesslike.
Benjamin Graham
You are neither right nor wrong because the crowd disagrees with you. You are right because your data and reasoning are right.
Benjamin Graham
To achieve satisfactory investment results is easier than most people realise; to achieve superior results is harder than it looks.
Benjamin Graham
[Buying stock in new or virtually new ventures] This we condemn unhesitatingly and with emphasis. The odds are so strongly against the man who buys into these new flotation’s that he might as well throw ¾’s of his money out of the window and keep the rest in the bank.
Benjamin Graham
No-one will take as much care with your money as you will yourself.
Bob Jones
Investment expertise can never be bought or hired. Anyone possessing such skill will use it on his own behalf for the maximum personal gain, and will not on behalf of a host of ungrateful strangers for a pittance of a salary.
Bob Jones
Any experienced investor knows only too well that when it comes to liquidity and interest rates, nothing is carved in stone. That is why, like everything in life, professional investors seek as much certainty as possible and always opt for a long-term fixed interest rate when they borrow, no matter that current forecasting may be projecting future interest rate declines. If the deal works at current rates, then only a fool would place it in the realms of uncertainty by borrowing at floating rates.
Bob Jones
Many [property investors] are migrants driven by a hunger to succeed and a self-help attitude deserving of nothing but respect.
Bob Jones
Any investor who’s been around the block will confirm that the old adage about banks being fair-weather friends is true. Banks clamour to lend money in good times, but panic when the economy turns southwards.
Bob Jones
In short, the golden rule of property investment is to buy quality and never sell.
Bob Jones
Rapid wealth from property investment stems primarily from borrowed funds and it follows that anyone capable of organising a property empire is smart enough to do it on his own behalf and not for the benefit of a lot of old lady shareholders.
Bob Jones
You should do your own investing and not let others do it for you no matter how small your beginnings. You will make far more money with far less risk.
Bob Jones
Property is a money business and when emotion intrudes the money goes right out the window.
Bob Jones
In short, I am saying stay away from undeveloped land. It will return you nothing or next to nothing on your capital and cost you rates while you wait for a miracle. If you’re lucky and the miracle occurs, chances are it could happen to coincide with the fortunately rare occasions when the voting public lose their senses and give the Labour Party a crack in office.
Bob Jones
Half a century’s experience has taught me that, profit-wise, less is more. In other word’s, do less and think more and in the process make every post a winning post.
Bob Jones
Some countries, notably in Asia, allow foreign commercial property ownership only where there is a 50 percent partnership with a local. Every account I’ve heard of where some brave soul has done this has been a tale of distress.
Bob Jones
There is no great secret in fortune making. All you do is buy cheap and sell dear, act with thrift and shrewdness and be persistent.
Hetty Green
I buy when things are low and no one wants them. I keep them until they go up, and people are crazy to get them.
Hetty Green
To quote the stock markets – suppose you buy at 16 and are offered 32… Better take the offer, I say; 32 in the hand is worth the whole arithmetic in the bush.
Hetty Green
The odds of anyone calling you on the phone with good investment advice are about the same as winning Lotto without buying a ticket.
Joel Greenblatt
Reading and studying Graham’s work is how I first became fascinated with the stock market. I still apply his teachings wherever and whenever I can.
Joel Greenblatt
[On value-oriented strategies] Though these strategies have been well documented over many years, most individual and professional investors do not have the patience to use them.
Joel Greenblatt
It might not be today or tomorrow, but if you do your homework well, the stock market will eventually recognise the inherent value that attracted you to the bargain opportunity in the first place.
Joel Greenblatt
It has never been easier to make a fortune in real estate.
Robert G Allen
How many millionaires do you know who have become wealthy by investing in savings accounts?
Robert G Allen
Real estate is a wonderful wealth generator but a terrible cashflow generator.
Robert G Allen
[On focusing on cashflow] I try to pretend that the property I buy will never appreciate in value.
Robert G Allen
Be such a powerful steward over your forest of money trees that they can produce fruit to feed generations of people long after you have gone.
Robert G Allen
Avoiding where others go wrong is an important step in achieving investment success.
Seth Klarman
Individual and institutional investors alike frequently demonstrate an inability to make long-term investment decisions based on business fundamentals.
Seth Klarman
Once you adopt a value-investment strategy, any other investment behaviour starts to seem like gambling.
Seth Klarman
When a Wall Street analyst or broker expresses optimism, investors must take it with a grain of salt.
Seth Klarman
There is a value gene. You simply get it or not.
Seth Klarman
Human nature never changes.
Seth Klarman
One risk-related consideration should be paramount above all others: the ability to sleep well at night, confident that your financial position is secure whatever the future may bring.
Seth Klarman
Many times people do not make money simply because they fear losing money more.
Robert Kiyosaki
If you are not happy while getting rich, chances are you will not be happy when you do get rich. So whether you are rich or poor, make sure you are happy.
Robert Kiyosaki
Money is a teaching tool.
Robert Kiyosaki
The more people you serve the richer you become.
Robert Kiyosaki
The questions is, ‘Can you become very good at investing in at least two different assets or asset classes? If you can, financial magic can happen.’
Robert Kiyosaki
Think like a dairy farmer (cashflow), not like a cattle rancher (capital gains).
Robert Kiyosaki
In my seminars, I am often asked, ‘Why don’t more people invest for cashflow? While I am certain there are many answers, I believe there is one primary reason… and that reason is, good cashflow at a good price is hard to find.
Robert Kiyosaki
Investing is not risky. Investing is fun. Investing can make you very very rich. More importantly investing can set you free, free from the struggle of earning a living and worrying about money.
Robert Kiyosaki
Your home is not an asset.
Robert Kiyosaki
The rich invent money.
Robert Kiyosaki
There are no limits, no ceilings, glass or otherwise, for women in the world of investing.
Kim Kiyosaki
A man is not a plan.
Kim Kiyosaki
Ultimately money buys you one of two things: It buys you slavery or it buys your freedom.
Kim Kiyosaki
Never invest in any idea you can’t illustrate with a crayon.
Peter Lynch
All else being equal, invest in the company with the fewest colour photographs in the annual report.
Peter Lynch
The thing to remember is that we’ve wiggled out of every recession since the one that turned into the Great Depression.
Peter Lynch
Good investing is boring.
George Soros
Perfect knowledge is not attainable.
George Soros
Bull markets are born in pessimism, grow on scepticism, mature on optimism and die on euphoria.
John Templeton
People are always asking me where is the outlook good, but that’s the wrong question, The right question is: Where is the outlook most miserable?
John Templeton
To buy when others are despondently selling and to sell when others are avidly buying requires the greatest of fortitude and pays the greatest ultimate rewards.
John Templeton
The time of maximum pessimism is the best time to buy, and the time of maximum optimism is the best time to sell.
John Templeton
Buy in gloom, sell in boom.
Rene Rivkin
I have never met a rich chartist.
Rene Rivkin
Never offer financial advice unless asked.
Rene Rivkin
Never offer ANY advice unless asked.
Rene Rivkin
Skepticism and pessimism aren’t synonymous. Skepticism calls for pessimism when optimism is excessive. But it also calls for optimism when pessimism is excessive.
Howard Marks
A hugely profitable investment that doesn’t begin with discomfort is usually an oxymoron.
Howard Marks
The best investment on earth is earth.
Louis Glickman
I had been trading since my fourteenth year. I had made my first thousand dollars when I was a kid of fifteen, and my first ten thousand before I was twenty-one. I had made and lost a ten thousand dollar stake more than once. In New York I had made thousands and lost them. I got up to fifty thousand dollars and two days later that went. I had no other business and knew no other game. After several years I was back where I began. No – worse, for I had acquired habits and a style of living that required money; though that part didn’t bother me as much as being wrong so consistently.
Jesse Livermore
I could improve your ultimate financial welfare by giving you a ticket with only twenty slots in it so that you had twenty punches – representing all the investments that you get to make in a lifetime. And once you’d punched through the card, you couldn’t make any more investments at all. Under those rules, you’d really think carefully about what you did, and you’d be forced to load up on what you’d really thought about. So you’d do so much better.
Warren Buffett
We don’t get paid for being busy, we get paid for being right.
Warren Buffett
I don’t know anyone who [learned to be a great investor] with great rapidity. Warren has gotten to be one hell of a lot better investor over the period I’ve know him, as have I. So the game is to keep learning. You have to like the learning process. I’ve watched Warren for decades. Warren has learned a lot, which has allowed him to [expand his circle of competence so he could invest in something like Petro China]. If you’ve going to be an investor, you’re going to make some investments where you don’t have all the experience you need. But if you keep trying to get a little better over time, you’ll start to make investments that are virtually certain to have a good outcome. The keys are discipline, hard work and practice. It’s like playing golf – you have to work on it. If you don’t keep learning, other people will pass you by.
Charlie Munger
Labels: Investment Quote
