Investing Quotes - Page 8

Activity is the enemy of investment returns.

Never count on making a good sale. Have the purchase price be so attractive that even a mediocre sale gives good results.

Capital will always go where it’s welcome and stay where it’s well treated. Capital is not just money. It’s also talent and ideas. They, too, will go where they’re welcome and stay where they are well treated.

Stock prices are likely to be among the prices that are relatively vulnerable to purely social movements because there is no accepted theory by which to understand the worth of stocks....investors have no model or at best a very incomplete model of behavior of prices, dividend, or earnings, of speculative assets.

In this business if you're good, you're right six times out of ten. You're never going to be right nine times out of ten.

There is a close logical connection between the concept of a safety margin and the principle of diversification.

The essence of investment management is the management of risks, not the management of returns.

As Buffett has often observed, value investing is not a concept that can be learned and gradually applied over time. It is either absorbed and adopted at once, or it is never truly learned.

You get recessions, you have stock market declines. If you don't understand that's going to happen, then you're not ready, you won't do well in the markets.

The best stock to buy is the one you already own.

Time is on your side when you own shares of superior companies.

If you invest in a girl or a woman, you are investing in everybody else.

Instead of hoping he must fear and instead of fearing he must hope. He must fear that his loss may develop into a much bigger loss, and hope that his profit may become a big profit.

You hear all this whining going on, "Where are our great writers?" The thing I might feel doleful about is: Where are the readers?

Investing is most intelligent when it is most businesslike.

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

The key to investing is not assessing how much an industry is going to affect society, or how much it will grow, but rather determining the competitive advantage of any given company and, above all, the durability of that advantage.

You know ... you keep doing the same things and you keep getting the same result over and over again.

One, which I mention several times elsewhere, is the need for patience if big profits are to be made from investment. Put another way, it is often easier to tell what will happen to the price of a stock than how much time will elapse before it happens. The other is the inherently deceptive nature of the stock market. Doing what everybody 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.

We define a bargain issue as one which, on the basis of facts established by analysis, appears to be worth considerably more that it is selling for.

Always buy your straw hats in the Winter

Some investments do have higher expected returns than others. Which ones? Well, by and large they're the ones that will do the worst in bad times.

I try to buy stock in businesses that are so wonderful that an idiot can run them. Because sooner or later, one will.

Of one thing the investor can be certain: A large company's need to bring in a new chief executive from the outside is a damning sign of something basically wrong with the existing management - no matter how good the surface signs may have been as indicated by the most recent earnings statement.

Investing in stocks is an art, not a science, and people who've been trained to rigidly quantify everything have a big disadvantage.