Mimicking the Herd
Mimicking the herd invites regression to the mean.
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Reading and Thinking
We both, Warren Buffett and I, insist on a lot of time being available almost every day to just sit...
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Good Ideas Are Hard to Find
Our cash is speaking for itself. If we had a lot of wonderful ideas, we wouldn’t have so much cash.
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Good vs. Bad Investment Ideas
Benjamin Graham used to say, “It’s not the bad investment ideas that fail; it’s the good ideas that get pushed...
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Margin of Safety
In engineering, people have a big margin of safety. But in the financial world, people don’t give a damn about...
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Competition in Investing
The investment game is getting more and more competitive.
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Being a Good Investor
Understanding how to be a good investor makes you a better business manager and vice versa.
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Make the Market Your Servant
The idea of a margin of safety, a Graham precept, will never be obsolete. The idea of making the market...
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No Big Advantages
We don’t have big advantages — no special competence — so we spend almost no time on it.
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Charlie and Warren
I’ve been associated with Warren so long, I thought I’d be just a footnote.
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Discounted Cash Flows
Warren talks about these discounted cash flows. I’ve never seen him do one.
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Numerical Fluency
Without numerical fluency, in the part of life most of us inhabit, you are like a one-legged man in an...
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Good vs. Bad Ideas
It’s not the bad ideas that do you in, but the good ones.
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Cranky Businesses
A lot of the businesses we buy at Berkshire Hathaway are kind of cranky and old-fashioned like us.
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How to Succeed in Investing
You need patience, discipline, and an ability to take losses and adversity without going crazy.
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Be Aggressive When It’s Time
Most people are too fretful, they worry to much. Success means being very patient, but aggressive when it’s time.
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Have Passion for Something
You’ll do better if you have passion for something in which you have aptitude. If Warren Buffett had gone into...
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Predicting the Future
We have the same problem as everyone else: It’s very hard to predict the future.
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Charlie Munger’s Education
To this day, I have never taken a course anywhere, in chemistry, economics, psychology, or business.
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Choosing Easy Predictions
We’re the tortoise that has outrun the hare because it chose the easy predictions.
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Dampen Investment Expectations
One of the smartest things a person can do is dampen investment expectations, especially with Berkshire. That would be mature...
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Inflation in the Investment Climate
I remember the $0.05 hamburger and a $0.40-per-hour minimum wage, so I’ve seen a tremendous amount of inflation in my...
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Share Buybacks
A lot of share-buying, not bargain-seeking, is designed to prop stock prices up.
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Eliminate What Not to Do
Quickly eliminate the big universe of what not to do, follow up with a fluent, multidisciplinary attack on what remains,...
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When Decisions Are Too Hard
We just throw some decisions into the “too hard” file and go onto others.
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Sit-on-Your-Ass Investing
Sit-on-your-ass-investing: You’re paying less to brokers, you’re listening to less nonsense, and if it works, the tax system gives you...
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More Brains in Money Management
It’s natural that you’d have more brains going into money management. There are so many huge incomes in money management...
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Valuing a Stock
You must value the business in order to value the stock.
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The Expectations Game
What we don’t like in modern capitalism is the expectations game. It’s not the kissing cousin of evil; it’s the...
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Terrible Investors
A lot of people with high IQs are terrible investors because they’ve got terrible temperaments. And that is why we...
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Slow Learners
After nearly making a terrible mistake not buying See’s, we’ve made this mistake many times. We are apparently slow learners.
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Betting on Sure Things
Berkshire in its history has made money betting on sure things.
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Getting Out of the Country Club
If you, like me, lived through 1973-74 or even the early 1990s… There was a waiting list to get OUT...
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Missing Out on Opportunity
Missing out on some opportunity never bothers us. What’s wrong with someone getting a little richer than you? It’s crazy...
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I think the notion that liquidity of tradable common stock is a great contributor to capitalism is mostly twaddle. The...
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The total amount paid out in dividends is roughly equal to the amount lost in trading and investment advice, so...
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A foreign correspondent, after talking to me for a while, once said: “You don’t seem smart enough to be so...
Related Topics: correspondent, explanation, foreign, foreign correspondent, smart, talking Using Capital Strength
Our record in the past if you average it out has been quite respectable. Why shouldn’t we use our capital...
Related Topics: average, capital, record, respectable, strength, why Being Short in a Rising Market
Being short and seeing a promoter take the stock up is very irritating. It’s not worth it to have that...
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