I’m proud to be associated with the value system at Berkshire Hathaway; I think you’ll make more money in the end with good ethics than bad.
If you buy something because it’s undervalued, then you have to think about selling it when it approaches your calculation of its intrinsic value. That’s hard. But if you buy a few great companies, then you can sit on your ass. That’s a good thing.
I find it quite useful to think of a free-market economy – or partly free market economy – as sort of the equivalent of an ecosystem. Just as animals flourish in niches, people who specialize in some narrow niche can do very well.
It’s a good habit to trumpet your failures and be quiet about your successes.
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.