I was a little bit of a cocky kid.
I am always prepared to do the right thing regardless of what other people think.
If I believe that I am right, I will take it to the end of the earth until I am proven right.
In order to be successful, you have to make sure that being rejected doesn’t bother you at all.
Investing is a business where you can look very silly for a long period of time before you are proven right.
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.
Short-term market and economic prognostication is largely a fool’s errand, we invest according to a strategy that makes the need to rely on short-term market or economic assessments largely irrelevant.
You can learn investing by reading books.
If you think of the typical Herbalife distributor and their level of sophistication, to this day I still don’t understand the marketing plan – true story.
Herbalife: the customers are fictitious, the business opportunity is a scam, the university degree is a fraud.
If you look at the great frauds of all time, Enron had that phantom trading floor. What Herbalife has is it has phantom or fictitious customers.
Experience is making mistakes and learning from them.
I think a very good system in a world with a lot of passive investors is one in which there are at least a few entrepreneurial investors, prepared to say what they think, prepared to propose a change in management, change in strategy, change in cost structure, capital structure.