Investing Quotes - Page 34

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Economics exists to make astrology look respectable.

The pursuit of things robs me of investing more in the work of Christ.

He that is overcautious will accomplish little.

There is general agreement among researchers that nearly all stock pickers, whether they know it or not-and few of them do-are playing a game of chance.

Most of the mutual fund investments I have are index funds, approximately 75%.

Stop spending your time; start investing your time.

An index fund is a fund that simply invests in all of the stocks in a market. So, for example, an index fund might invest in every single stock or almost every single stock in the U.S. market, it might invest in every single stock abroad, or it might invest in all of the bonds that are out there. And you can make a perfectly fine investing portfolio that mixes equal parts of all three of those.

The deeper one delves, the worse things look for actively managed funds.

Investing is not a natural science but rather a social science. So, it's never purely empirical; what you are trying to do is everything you possibly can to enhance your probabilities of being right more often than being wrong.

It is not the return on my investment that I am concerned about; it's the return of my investment

Does management resist the institutional imperative?

Is management candid with the shareholders?

For some reason, people take their cues from price action rather than from values. What doesn't work is when you start doing things that you don't understand or because they worked last week for somebody else. The dumbest reason in the world to buy a stock is because it's going up.

You could be somewhere where the mail was delayed three weeks and do just fine investing.

When Berkshire buys common stock, we approach the transaction as if we were buying into a private business.

Is management rational?

I think the oversight is great, and I think that oversight ought to be devoted almost entirely to the question is this being done at market you know. In other words, you want to make sure that the government isn't investing foolishly. But you don't want to care about which congressional districts it goes to or whether banks get favored over.

In economics, you always want to ask 'And then what?'

If at first you do succeed, quit trying on investing.

... it's important to have the right monetary policy. It's important for, to have the right fiscal policy. But it's nowhere near as important as just the normal regenerative capacity of American capitalism.

You do not adequately protect yourself by being half awake when other are sleeping.

Does the business have a consistent operating history?

An investor should ordinarily hold a small piece of an outstanding business with the same tenacity that an owner would exhibit if he owned all of that business.

When you build a bridge, you insist that it can carry 30,000 pounds, but you only drive 10,000-pound trucks across it. And that same principle works in investing.