Top 968 Quotes & Sayings by Warren Buffett - Page 6

An investor will succeed by coupling good business judgment with an ability to insulate his thoughts and behavior from the super-contagious emotions that swirl about the marketplace.

Focus alone is not enough; putting in the time to commit is also crucial to achieve success.

A prediction about the direction of the stock market tells you nothing about where stocks are headed, but a whole lot about the person doing the predicting.

I don't read economic forecasts. I don't read the funny papers.

Asset-heavy businesses generally earn low rates of return - rates that often barely provide enough capital to fund the inflationary needs of the existing business, with nothing left over for real growth, for distribution to owners, or for acquisition of new businesses

Investment ideas, like women are often more exciting than punctual.

Investors... can't pick stocks that are better than average. Stocks are a good thing to own over time. There's only two things you can do wrong: You can buy the wrong ones, and you can buy or sell them at the wrong time. And the truth is you never need to sell them.

Bull markets and Bear markets can obscure mathematical laws, they cannot repeal them.

You can't buy what is popular and do well.

The plan itself is opportunism. There is no plan before that.

Accounting is the language of business.

There is nothing like writing to force you to think and get your thoughts straight.

The key to life is to figure out who to be the batboy for.

The wise man once said invest young

A home is one of the most important assets that most people will ever buy. Homes are also where memories are made and you want to work with someone you can trust.

There is no substitute for a local newspaper that is doing its job.

The critical investment factor is determining the intrinsic value of a business and paying a fair or bargain price.

Anyone who believes a growth rate in excess of 15% per annum over the long term is attainable should pursue a career in sales, but avoid one in mathematics.

Part of making good decisions in business is recognizing the poor decisions you've made and why they were poor. I've made lots of mistakes. I'm going to make more. It's the name of the game. You don't want to expect perfection in yourself. You want to strive to do your best. It's too demanding to expect perfection in yourself.

I was lucky enough to be born in a time and place where society values my talent, and gave me a good education to develop that talent, and set up the laws and the finanical system to let me do what I love doing-and make a lot of money doing it. The least I can do is help pay for all that.

The most important thing in terms of your circle of competence is not how large the area of it is, but how well you've defined the perimeter.

If you have a great manager, you want to pay him very well.

Possessing a powerful worldwide brand is essential for sustained success.

I knew a lot about what I did when I was 20. I had read a lot, and I aspired to learn everything I could about the subject.

Investing is forgoing consumption now in order to have the ability to consume more at a later date.

We like to buy businesses, but we don't like to sell them.

We try to exert a Ted Williams kind of discipline. In his book The Science of Hitting, Ted explains that he carved the strike zone into 77 cells, each the size of a baseball. Swinging only at balls in his "best" cell, he knew, would allow him to bat .400; reaching for balls in his "worst" spot, the low outside corner of the strike zone, would reduce him to .230. In other words, waiting for the fat pitch would mean a trip to the Hall of Fame; swinging indiscriminately would mean a ticket to the minors.

Investors making purchases in an overheated market need to recognize that it may often take an extended period for the value of even an outstanding company to catch up with the price they paid.

When the brothel burns down, even the pretty girls have to run out.

Long ago, Sir Isaac Newton gave us three laws of motion, which were the work of genius. But Sir Isaac's talents didn't extend to investing: He lost a bundle in the South Sea Bubble, explaining later, 'I can calculate the movement of the stars, but not the madness of men.' If he had not been traumatized by this loss, Sir Isaac might well have gone on to discover the Fourth Law of Motion: For investors as a whole, returns decrease as motion increases.

If you can't communicate and talk to other people and get across your ideas, you're giving up your potential.

Interest rates are to asset prices what gravity is to the apple. When there are low interest rates, there is a very low gravitational pull on asset prices.

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 our view, though, investment students need only two well-taught courses - How to Value a Business, and How to Think About Market Prices.

If, when making a stock investment, you're not considering holding it at least ten years, don't waste more than ten minutes considering it.

You don't have to be a genius to invest well

All there is to investing is picking good stocks at good times and staying with them as long as they remain good companies.

Your money can be inflated away but your knowledge and talent cannot.

The fundamental basis of above-average performance in the long run is sustainable competitive advantage.

The thing to do is to keep your mind when the world around you is losing theirs.

I've seen more people fail because of liquor and leverage -- leverage being borrowed money. You really don't need leverage in this world much. If you're smart, you're going to make a lot of money without borrowing.

What you really want to do in investments is figure out what's important and knowable. If it's unimportant or unknowable you forget about it.

You have to turn over a lot of rocks to find those little anomalies. You have to find the companies that are off the map - way off the map. You may find local companies that have nothing wrong with them at all. A company that I found, Western Insurance Securities, was trading for $3/share when it was earning $20/share!! I tried to buy up as much of it as possible. No one will tell you about these businesses. You have to find them.

But 300 million Americans, their lending institutions, their government, their media, all believed that house prices were going to go up consistently. And that got billed into a $20 trillion residential home market. Lending was done based on it, and everybody did a lot of foolish things.

I wouldn't want to manufacture cigarettes. But if I owned - we do own Costco. Do they sell them? Yes. So I don't have a problem owning stock in that. But I just wouldn't want to - I wouldn't want to do it myself. I basically think, if anything is sufficiently antisocial, society should do something about it. But that's a separate question. But - and I don't think there's any company that I have seen that's 100 percent pure.

Stop trying to predict the direction of the stock market, the economy or elections.

I don't measure my life by the money I've made. Other people might, but certainly don't.

Read Ben Graham and Phil Fisher read annual reports, but don't do equations with Greek letters in them.

You have to turn over a lot of rocks to find those little anomalies. You have to find the companies that are off the map - way off the map.

A diamond cannot be polished without friction, nor a person perfected without trials. Someone is enjoying shade today because someone planted a tree a long time ago.

The gross profits in many workouts appear quite small. It's a little like looking for parking meters with some time left on them. However, the predictability coupled with a short holding period produces quite decent average annual rates of return after allowance for the occasional substantial loss.

The important thing is to keep playing, to play against weak opponents and to play for big stakes.

I've made money over the years by buying into good companies, run by good people, at attractive prices. And I don't try and make it out of buying into the market at one point and selling at another point.

The commission of the investment sins listed above is not limited to 'the little guy.' Huge institutional investors, viewed as a group, have long underperformed the unsophisticated index-fund investor who simply sits tight for decades. A major reason has been fees: Many institutions pay substantial sums to consultants who, in turn, recommend high-fee managers. And that is a fool's game.

That which is not worth doing at all is not worth doing well.

Bad terminology is the enemy of good thinking.

I've often felt there might be more to be gained by studying business failures than business successes.

When asked how he became so successful in investing, Buffett answered: 'we read hundreds and hundreds of annual reports every year.

I learned to go into business only with people whom I like, trust, and admire.

Invest in as much of yourself as you can, you are your own biggest asset by far.

There is no staff. I make all the investment decisions and I do all my own analysis.