After nearly making a terrible mistake not buying See’s, we’ve made this mistake many times. We are apparently slow learners. These opportunity costs don’t show up on financial statements, but have cost us many billions.
If you have the opportunities of Berkshire, an investment in gold is dumb.
It’s a rare business that doesn’t have a way worse future than it has a past.
The ethos of not fooling yourself is one of the best you could possibly have. It’s powerful because it’s so rare.
It took us months of buying all the Coke stock we could to accumulate $1 billion worth – equal to 7% of the company. It’s very hard to accumulate major positions.
Stock-picking is like gambling: those who win well, seldom bet, but when they do, they bet heavily.
The liabilities are always 100 percent good. It’s the assets you have to worry about.
We only want what success we can get despite encouraging others to share our general views about reality.
It would be one of the most irritating experiences in the world to do a lot of work to uncover a fraud and then at have it go from X to 3X and at h the crooks happily partying with your money while you’re meeting margin calls. Why would you want to go within hailing distance of that?
Being short and seeing a promoter take the stock up is very irritating. It’s not worth it to have that much irritation in your life.
Early Charlie Munger is a horrible career model for the young because not enough was delivered to civilization in return for what was wrested from capitalism. And other similar career models are even worse.
Ben Franklin and Samuel Johnson, he credits their wisdom for his success. “They were both utterly brilliant men. And powerful communicators. Both have helped me all the way through life. Their lessons are easy to assimilate.”
Quoting Demosthenes, ‘For what each man wishes, that he also believes to be true.’ I would rather make money playing a piano in a whorehouse than arguing that no cost is incurred when employees are paid in stock options instead of cash. I am not kidding.
It’s dangerous to short stocks.
In Gillette’s case, they keep surfing along new technology which is fairly simple by the standards of microchips. But it’s hard for competitors to do. So they’ve been able to stay constantly near the edge of improvements in shaving.
It’s simplicity itself to say its future will be way worse than its past.
Why should it be easy to do something that, if done well, two or three times, will make your family rich for life?
I think there’s something to be said for developing the disposition to own stocks without fretting.
If all you succeed in doing in life is getting rich by buying little pieces of paper, it’s a failed life. Life is more than being shrewd in wealth accumulation.
If you don’t allow for self-serving bias in the conduct of others, you are, again, a fool.