The worst thing you can do is invest in companies you know nothing about. Unfortunately, buying stocks on ignorance is still a popular American pastime.
You should not buy a stock because it’s cheap but because you know a lot about it.
Everyone has the brain power to make money in stocks. Not everyone has the stomach.
Visiting stores and testing products is one of the critical elements of the analyst’s job.
I spend about fifteen minutes a year on economic analysis.
Nobody can predict interest rates, the future direction of the economy or the stock market. Dismiss all such forecasts and concentrate on what’s actually happening to the companies in which you’ve invested.
The typical big winner in the Lynch portfolio generally takes three to ten years to play out.
Just because you buy a stock and it goes up does not mean you are right. Just because you buy a stock and it goes down does not mean you are wrong.
An important key to investing is to remember that stocks are not lottery tickets.
The junior high schools and high schools of America have forgotten to teach one of the most important courses of all. Investing.
As I look back on it now, it’s obvious that studying history and philosophy was much better preparation for the stock market than, say, studying statistics.
If you’re lucky enough to have been rewarded in life to the degree that I have, there comes a point at which you have to decide whether to become a slave to your net worth by devoting the rest of your life to increasing it or to let what you’ve accumulated begin to serve you.
Spend at least as much time researching a stock as you would choosing a refrigerator.
I deal in facts, not forecasting the future. That’s crystal ball stuff. That doesn’t work.
I don’t go near the money and the money doesn’t go near me.
Long-term investing has gotten so popular, it’s easier to admit you’re a crack addict than to admit you’re a short-term investor.
When people discover they are no good at baseball or hockey, they put away their bats and their skates and they take up amateur golf or stamp collecting or gardening. But when people discover they are no good at picking stocks, they are likely to continue to do it anyway.
Twenty years in this business convinces me that any normal person using the customary three percent of the brain can pick stocks just as well, if not better, than the average Wall Street expert.
In our society, it’s been the men who’ve handled most of the finances, and the women who’ve stood by and watched men botch things up.
When even the analysts are bored, it’s time to start buying.