Warren Buffett
The line separating investment and speculation, which is never bright and clear, becomes blurred still further when most market participants have recently enjoyed triumphs. Nothing sedates rationality like large doses of effortless money. After a heady experience of that kind, normally sensible people drift into behavior akin to that of Cinderella at the ball.Collection: Investing Money
If you gave me the choice of being CEO of General Electric or IBM or General Motors, you name it, or delivering papers, I would deliver papers. I would. I enjoyed doing that. I can think about what I want to think. I don't have to do anything I don't want to do.Collection: Thinking
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.Collection: Running
Take the job you would take if you were independently wealthy. You're going to do well at it.Collection: Jobs
In our view, derivatives are financial weapons of mass destruction carrying dangers that, while latent, are potentially lethal.Collection: Business
If you expect to continue to purchase stocks throughout your life, you should welcome price declines as a way to add stocks more cheaply to your portfolio.Collection: Add
You are neither right nor wrong because the crowd disagrees with you.Collection: Life
In business, I look for economic castles protected by unbreachable 'moats'.Collection: Castles
The problem with commodities is that you are betting on what someone else would pay for them in six months. The commodity itself isn't going to do anything for you....it is an entirely different game to buy a lump of something and hope that somebody else pays you more for that lump two years from now than it is to buy something that you expect to produce income for you over time.Collection: Years
Buy into a company because you want to own it, not because you want the stock to go up.Collection: Investing Money
A market downturn, doesn't bother us. For us and our long term investors, it is an opportunity to increase our ownership of great companies with great management at good prices. Only for short term investors and market timers is a correction not an opportunity.Collection: Opportunity
Buy stocks like you buy your groceries, not like you buy your perfume.Collection: Like You
I have always cautioned partners that I considered three years a minimum in determining whether we were "performing".Collection: Years
The dominant factors affecting control valuations are earning power (past and prospective) and asset values.Collection: Past
Intrinsic value can be defined simply: It is the discounted value of the cash that can be taken out of a business during its remaining life.Collection: Taken
There is one thing of which I can assure you. If good performance of the fund is even a minor objective, any portfolio encompassing one hundred stocks (whether the manager is handling one thousand dollars or one billion dollars) is not being operated logically. The addition of the one hundredth stock simply can't reduce the potential variance in portfolio performance sufficiently to compensate for the negative effect its inclusion has on the overall portfolio expectation.Collection: Expectations
There is no substitute for a local newspaper that is doing its job.Collection: Jobs
Making money isn't the backbone of our guiding purpose; it is the by-product of our guiding purpose.Collection: Purpose
Don't invest in pieces of papers (stocks), invest in great businesses underlying themCollection: Pieces
When bills come due, only cash is legal tender. Don't leave home without it.Collection: Home
I certainly have no desire to sell a good controlled business run by people I like and admire, merely to obtain a fancy price. However, specific conditions may cause the sale of one operating unit at some point.Collection: Running
It is impossible to unsign a contract, so do all your thinking before you sign.Collection: Thinking
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.Collection: Law
Managers and investors alike must understand that accounting numbers are the beginning, not the end, of business valuation.Collection: Numbers
In an inflationary world, a toll bridge (like company) would be a great thing to own because you've laid out the capital costs. You built it in old dollars and you don't have to keep replacing it.Collection: Bridges
A fool and his money are soon invited everywhere.Collection: Money
You should be unconcerned about short-term price action when you own the securities directly, just as you were unconcerned when you owned them indirectly through BPL. I think about them as businesses, not "stocks", and if the business does all right over the long term, so will the stock.Collection: Thinking
We will prosper or suffer in controlled investments in relation to the operating performances of our businesses - we will not attempt to profit by playing various games in the securities markets.Collection: Games
What's hot today isn't likely to be hot tomorrow. The stock market reverts to fundamental returns over the long run. Don't follow the herd.Collection: Running
The three most important words in investing...Margin of Safety.Collection: Safety
Returns decrease as motion increases.Collection: Return
The greater the potential for reward in the value portfolio, the less risk there is.Collection: Risk
Anything can happen in stock markets and you ought to conduct your affairs so that if the most extraordinary events happen, that you're still around to play the next day.Collection: Play
The ideal business is one that earns very high returns on capital and that keeps using lots of capital at those high returns. That becomes a compounding machine.Collection: Machines
I bought a company in the mid-90s called Dexter Shoe and paid $400 million for it. And it went to zero. And I gave about $400 million worth of Berkshire stock, which is probably now worth $400 billion. But I've made lots of dumb decisions. That's part of the game.Collection: Zero
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.Collection: Investing
I would rather sustain the penalties resulting from over-conservatism than face the consequences of error, perhaps with permanent capital loss, resulting from the adoption of "New Era" philosophy where trees really do grow to the sky.Collection: Philosophy
So some guy may know how to make money in cocoa beans, but I don't so I just let him have that. But it's got to be something I understand. It's got to be a business with fundamentally good economics. It's got to be a management that I like and trust and admire. And it's got to be a price that makes sense.Collection: Guy
What we learn from history is that people don't learn from history.Collection: Learning
If you can tell me who your heroes are, I can tell you how you're going to turn out in life.Collection: Life
When Berkshire Hathaway laid out three billion dollars for GE today, we didn't spend it, we invested it. When the Federal government buys the mortgages, they're not spending it, they're investing it. Now, they're investing it in distress type assets but they're buying them at distress prices if they buy them at market. It's the kind of stuff I love to do. I just don't have 700 million. Maybe we could go in it together.Collection: Government
Money is not everything. Make sure you earn a lot before speaking such nonsense.Collection: Investing
You can't produce a baby in one month by getting nine women pregnant.Collection: Baby
All I have to do is think and not be influenced by others.Collection: Thinking
Learning how to live is much more important than learning how to make a living.Collection: Inspirational Life
No matter how great the talent or efforts, some things just take time.Collection: Smart
The secret to happiness is having low expectations.Collection: Expectations
Knowing the edge of your competency is important. If you think you know more than you do, you will get in trouble.Collection: Thinking
Whatever you like to do, make it a hobby and whatever the world likes to do, make it a business.Collection: Hobbies