Botswana was rich in diamonds, Ghana in cocoa and gold, Morocco in phosphates. There were many countries I was eager to visit and revisit, such as Zambia, with its emeralds and copper, and Cameroon, awash in oil. I could not wait to visit.
The first loss is the best loss.
I think this is also a great time to invest in private equity, helping companies grow from the ground up.
Unfortunately politicians are not very sound people or they wouldn’t be politicians.
Index investing outperforms active management year after year.
Right now I own shares of companies in 28 countries.
Lady Luck smiles on those who continue their efforts.
If the current birth rate, which is the lowest in the major developed countries, continues, there will be no Japanese. Who will pay the enormous debt?
If you bail out every investment bank that gets in trouble, that’s not capitalism, that’s socialism for the rich.
Teach your children or your grandchildren Chinese. It is going to be the most important language of their lifetimes.
The City of London and Wall Street are not going to be great places to be in the next two or three decades. It’s going to be the people who produce real goods in charge – the farmers and the miners.
Beware of all politicians everywhere. They excelled at recess when they were in school but have excelled at little since.
Not one country in existence today has had the same borders and government for as long as two hundred years. The world will continue changing.
They wouldn’t be politicians if they knew what they were doing.
I don’t think I own any US stocks, if I do its very few, so few I can’t even remember.
Acknowledge the complexity of the world and resist the impression that you easily understand it. People are too quick to accept conventional wisdom, because it sounds basically true and it tends to be reinforced by both their peers and opinion leaders, many of whome have never looked at whether the facts support the received wisdom. It’s a basic fact of life that many things “everybody knows” turn out to be wrong.
Nearly every time I strayed from the herd, I’ve made a lot of money. Wandering away from the action is the way to find the new action.
The Roman censor Appius Claudius the Blind said, “Every man is the architect of his own fortune.
Do not worry about failure, I would tell them. Do not worry about making mistakes in life. It is good to lose money, to go broke at least once, and preferably twice. But if you are going to do it, do it early in your career. It is better to go bust when you are talking about $20,000 than when you are talking about $20 million. Do it early, and it is not the end of the world.
There is nothing better than having to struggle and make your own way.