A Quote by Charlie Munger
The model I like to sort of simplify the notion of what goes on in a market for common stocks is the pari-mutuel system at the racetrack. If you stop to think about it, a pari-mutuel system is a market. Everybody goes there and bets and the odds change based on what's bet. That's what happens in the stock market.
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So you can get very remarkable investment results if you think more like a winning pari-mutuel player. Just think of it as a heavy odds against game full of craziness with an occasional mispriced something or other. And you're probably not going to be smart enough to find thousands in a lifetime. And when you get a few, you really load up. It's just that simple.
At the core of an analytical edge is an ability to systematically distinguish between fundamentals and expectations. Fundamentals are a well thought out distribution of outcomes, and expectations are what's priced into an asset. A power metaphor is the [pari-mutuel] racetrack. The fundamentals are how fast a given horse will run and the expectations are the odds on the tote board. As any serious handicapper knows, you make money only by finding a mispricing between the performance of the horse and the odds. There are no 'good' or 'bad' horses, just correctly or incorrectly priced ones.
To us, investing is the equivalent of going out and betting against the pari-mutuel system. We look for a horse with one chance in two of winning, and that pays three to one. In other words, we're looking for a mispriced gamble. That's what investing is, and you have to know enough to know whether the gamble is mispriced.
I think there are a lot of people out there that are speculating in the stock market. They have all kinds of tech stocks or social media stocks. If you want to gamble in the stock market, I would much rather gamble on a mining stock than a social media stock.
Stock market goes up or down, and you can't adjust your portfolio based on the whims of the market, so you have to have a strategy in a position and stay true to that strategy and not pay attention to noise that could surround any particular investment.
If a lot of money goes into the stock market, it'll push up prices, making money for stock speculators. Then the insiders can decide that it's time to sell out, and the market will plunge.
The European model is, first, a social and economic system founded on the role of the market, for no computer in the world can process information better than the market.
I returned to New Orleans and my problems with pari-mutuel windows and a dark-haired, milk-skinned wife from Martinique who went home with men from the Garden District while I was passed out in a houseboat on Lake Pontchartrain, the downdraft of U.S. Army helicopters flattening a plain of elephant grass in my dreams.
Index funds eliminate the risks of individual stocks, market sectors, and manager selection. Only stock market risk remains.
Free markets. What does this system mean? The answer is simple: it is the market economy, it is the system in which the cooperation of individuals in the social division of labor is achieved by the market.
When the weather changes and hurricanes hit, nobody believes that the laws of physics have changed. Similarly, I don't believe that when the stock market goes into terrible gyrations its rules have changed. It's the same stock market with the same mechanisms and the same people.
If you were to just design the perfect retirement plan, you would own the stock market or you would own the bond market. You would get all the costs or all that you possibly could out of the system. So on an annual basis, if the market went up 8 percent, you would get 7.8 or 7.9 percent.
There's no automatic mechanism in a market system that reconciles the desire to save and the desire to invest. And therefore, the government has to sort of do something or the Federal Reserve, the Fed, or the Central Bank, or whatever, it has to intervene. It has to create enough investment for the economy not to suffer from a fall in aggregate demand. So, if you don't have a balance within the market system itself, then you need an external balance and that's what I think Keynes believed.
Favored stocks underperform the market, while out-of-favor companies outperform the market, but the reappraisal often happens slowly, even glacially.
...first check whether the market as a whole is rising or falling. In other words, are you in a bull market or bear market? If the latter, stay out. The odds are against you.
Speculators are obsessed with predicting: guessing the direction of stock prices. Every morning on cable television, every afternoon on the stock market report, every weekend in Barron's, every week in dozens of market newsletters, and whenever business people get together. In reality, no one knows what the market will do; trying to predict it is a waste of time, and investing based upon that prediction is a purely speculative undertaking.
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