Understanding both the power of compound interest and the difficulty of getting it is the heart and soul of understanding a lot of things.
You must force yourself to consider opposing arguments. Especially when they challenge your best loved ideas.
Warren spends 70 hours a week thinking about investing .
A business model that relies on trickery is doomed to fail.
It’s dishonourable to stay stupider than you need to be.
I don’t invest in what I don’t understand. And I don’t want to understand Facebook.
Being rational is a moral Imperative. You should never be stupider than you need to be.
Wells Fargo behaves better than the average big bank. But nobody’s perfect.
Opportunity cost is a huge filter in life. If you’ve got two suitors who are really eager to have you and one is way the hell better than the other, you do not have to spend much time with the other. And that’s the way we filter out buying opportunities.
Intelligent people make decisions based on opportunity costs.
There must be some wisdom in the folk saying: ‘It’s the strong swimmers who drown.’
I think gold is a great thing to sew onto your garments if you’re a Jewish family in Vienna in 1939, but civilized people don’t buy gold, they invest in productive businesses.
A banker who is allowed to borrow money at X and loan it out at X plus Y will just go crazy and do too much of it if the civilization doesn’t have rules that prevent it.
Economics is in many respects the queen of the soft sciences. It’s expected to be better than the rest. It’s my view that economics is better at the multi-disciplinary stuff than the rest of the soft science. And it’s also my view that it’s still lousy...
I don’t want to understand Facebook.
It’s not greed that drives the world, but envy.
If you have competence, you know the edge. It wouldnt be a competence if you didnt know where the boundaries lie. Asking whether youve passed the boundary is a question that almost answers itself.
Is there such thing as a cheerful pessimist? That’s what I am.
The way to win is to work, work, work, work and hope to have a few insights 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.
There’s no way that you can live an adequate life without many mistakes. In fact, one trick in life is to get so you can handle mistakes. Failure to handle psychological denial is a common way for people to go broke.