In the short run, the market is a voting machine, but in the long run it is a weighing machine.
The investor’s chief problem – and even his worst enemy – is likely to be himself.
The best way to measure your investing success is not by whether you’re beating the market but by whether you’ve put in place a financial plan and a behavioral discipline that are likely to get you where you want to go.
High valuations entail high risks.
Losing some money is an inevitable part of investing, and there’s nothing you can do to prevent it. But to be an intelligent investor, you must take responsibility for ensuring that you never lose most or all of your money.
Investing is most intelligent when it is most businesslike.
Experience teaches that the time to buy stocks is when their price is unduly depressed by temporary adversity. In other words, they should be bought on a bargain basis or not at all.
Great investing requires a lot of delayed gratification.
Opportunity comes to the prepared mind.
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.
Investing is where you find a few great companies and then sit on your ass.
If you took our top fifteen decisions out, we’d have a pretty average record. It wasn’t hyperactivity, but a hell of a lot of patience. You stuck to your principles and when opportunities came along, you pounced on them with vigor.
The stock market is a giant distraction to the business of investing.
A prudent speculator never argues with the tape. Markets are never wrong, opinions often are.
It is foolhardy to make a second trade, if your first trade shows you a loss. Never average losses. Let this thought be written indelibly upon your mind.
Never try to sell at the top. It isn’t wise. Sell after a reaction if there is no rally.
I take the market-efficiency hypothesis to be the simple statement that security prices fully reflect all available information.
I’ve not found ! one single mutual fund, one single real estate investment, any gold, silver or anything else that has given me higher returns than: me investing in myself.
I’m not emotional about investments. Investing is something where you have to be purely rational and not let emotion affect your decision making – just the facts.
People who invest make money for themselves; people who speculate make money for their brokers.