The old Wall Street adage “never invest in anything that eats or needs repairs” may apply to racehorses, but it’s malarkey when it comes to houses.
It’s human nature to keep doing something as long as it’s pleasurable and you can succeed at it, which is why the world population continues to double every 40 years.
Your ultimate success or failure will depend on your ability to ignore the worries of the world long enough to allow your investments to succeed.
Everyone has the brainpower to follow the stock market. If you made it through fifth-grade math, you can do it.
My method for picking stocks has never changed. When businesses go from crappy to semicrappy, there’s money to be made.
When management owns stock, then rewarding the shareholders becomes a first priority, whereas when management simply collects a paycheck, then increasing salaries becomes a first priority.
It only takes a handful of big winners to make a lifetime of investing worthwhile.
What makes stocks valuable in the long run isn’t the market. It’s the profitability of the shares in the companies you own. As corporate profits increase, corporations become more valuable and sooner or later, their shares will sell for a higher price.
I don’t know anyone who said on their deathbed: ‘Gee, I wish I’d spent more time at the office.’
If you’re prepared to invest in a company, then you ought to be able to explain why in simple language that a fifth grader could understand, and quickly enough so the fifth grader won’t get bored.
The Rule of 72 is useful in determining how fast money will grow. Take the annual return from any investment, expressed as a percentage, and divide it into 72. The result is the number of years it will take to double your money.
The real key to making money in stocks is not to get scared out of them.
Searching for companies is like looking for grubs under rocks: if you turn over 10 rocks you’ll likely find one grub; if you turn over 20 rocks you’ll find two.
You get recessions, you have stock market declines. If you don’t understand that’s going to happen, then you’re not ready, you won’t do well in the markets.