You’re not going to get very far in life based on what you already know. You’re going to advance in life by what you’re going to learn after you leave here.
The safest way to get what you want is to deserve what you want.
Those who will not face improvements because they are changes, will face changes that are not improvements.
I try to get rid of people who always confidently answer questions about which they don’t have any real knowledge.
It is remarkable how much long-term advantage people like us have gotten by trying to be consistently not stupid, instead of trying to be very intelligent.
A lot of our respected financial institutions are just casinos in drag.
It’s in the nature of stock markets to go way down from time to time. There’s no system to avoid bad markets. You can’t do it unless you try to time the market, which is a seriously dumb thing to do. Conservative investing with steady savings without expecting miracles is the way to go.
I’m used to people with very high IQs knowing how to recognize reality, but there’s a huge human tendency where it may be instructive to think that whatever you’re doing to succeed is all right.
In the corporate world, if you have analysts, due diligence, and no horse sense, you’ve just described hell.
A lot of success in life and business comes from knowing what you want to avoid: early death, a bad marriage, etc.
The world of derivatives is full of holes that very few people are really aware of. It’s like hydrogen and oxygen sitting on the corner waiting for a little flame.
Some people seem to think there’s no trouble just because it hasn’t happened yet. If you jump out the window at the 42nd floor and you’re still doing fine as you pass the 27th floor, that doesn’t mean you don’t have a serious problem. I would want to address the problem right now.
Mimicking the herd invites regression to the mean.
The whole concept of dividing it up into ‘value’ and ‘growth’ strikes me as twaddle. It’s convenient for a bunch of pension fund consultants to get fees prattling about and a way for one advisor to distinguish himself from another. But, to me, all intelligent investing is value investing.
Deliver to the world what you would buy if you were on the other end.
Those who keep learning, will keep rising in life.
Forgetting your mistakes is a terrible error if you are trying to improve your cognition.
Understanding how to be a good investor makes you a better business manager and vice versa.
Our job is to find a few intelligent things to do, not to keep up with every damn thing in the world.
You must value the business in order to value the stock.