Warren Buffett is the most successful investor of our time, possibly of any time. He is famed for his pithy quotes, which often appear in his annual letter to shareholders.
Taken together, his quotes pretty well sum up his speculation doctrine and approach. Here are his best sound bites of all time on being a sensible investor.
World Buffet
1. Rule No.1: Never lose money. Rule No.2: Never forget rule No.1.
2. Investing is laying out money now to get more money back in the future.
3. Never invest in a business you cannot understand.
4. I don't look to jump over 7-foot bars: I look colse to for 1-foot bars that I can step over.
5. I put heavy weight on certainty. It's not risky to buy securities at a fraction of what they're worth.
6. If a business does well, the stock finally follows.
7. It's far better to buy a extraordinary business at a fair price than a fair business at a extraordinary price.
8. Time is the friend of the extraordinary company, the enemy of the mediocre.
9. For some guess habitancy take their cues from price performance rather than from values. Price is what you pay. Value is what you get.
10. In the short run, the market is a voting machine. In the long run, it's a weighing machine.
11. The most base cause of low prices is pessimism. We want to do business in such an environment, not because we like pessimism, but because we like the prices it produces. It's optimism that is the enemy of the rational buyer. None of this means, however, that a business or stock is an attractive purchase naturally because it is unpopular; a contrarian arrival is just as foolish as a follow-the-crowd strategy. What's required is mental rather than polling.
12. Risk comes from not knowing what you're doing.
13. It is better to be approximately right than well wrong.
14. All there is to investing is picking good stocks at good times and staying with them as long as they remain good companies.
15. Wide diversification is only required when investors do not understand what they are doing.
16. You do things when the opportunities come along. I have had periods in my life when I have had a bundle of ideas come along, and I've had long dry spells. If I get an idea next week, I'll do something. If not, I won't do a damn thing.
17. [On the dot-com bubble:] What we learn from history is that habitancy don't learn from history.
18. You are neither right nor wrong because the crowd disagrees with you. You are right because your data and mental are right.
19. You don't need to be a rocket scientist. Investing is not a game where the guy with the 160 Iq beats the guy with 130 Iq.
20. You should invest in a business that even a fool can run, because someday a fool will.
21. When a supervision with a reputation for brilliance tackles a business with a reputation for bad economics, it is the reputation of the business that remains intact.
22. The best business returns are commonly achieved by fellowships that are doing something quite similar today to what they were doing five or ten years ago.
23. Diversification may reserve wealth, but attention builds wealth.
The speculation religious doctrine of Warren Buffett - In 23 Quotes