"Stock-picking is like gambling: those who win well, seldom bet, but when they do, they bet heavily."
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Quote collection
Charlie Munger quotes (page 2 of 26)
517 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"A lot of people with high IQs are terrible investors because they've got terrible temperaments. And that is why we say that having a certain kind of temperament is more important than brains. You need to keep raw irrational emotion under control. You need patience and discipline and an ability to take losses and adversity without going crazy. You need an ability to not be driven crazy by extreme success"
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"Three rules for a career: 1) Don’t sell anything you wouldn’t buy yourself; 2) Don’t work for anyone you don’t respect and admire; and 3) Work only with people you enjoy."
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"The more hard lessons you can learn vicariously rather than through your own hard experience, the better."
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"Any year that you don't destroy one of your best-loved ideas is probably a wasted year"
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"I do not think you can trust bankers to control themselves. They are like heroin addicts."
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"I got at a very early age, the idea that the safest way to try and get what you want, is to try and deserve what you want. It’s such a simple idea, it’s the golden rule so to speak. You want to deliver to the world what you would buy if you were on the other end."
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"We regard using [a stock's] volatility as a measure of risk is nuts. Risk to us is 1) the risk of permanent loss of capital, or 2) the risk of inadequate return. Some great businesses have very volatile returns - for example, See's [a candy company owned by Berkshire] usually loses money in two quarters of each year - and some terrible businesses can have steady results."
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"Some people seem to think there's no trouble just because it hasn't happened yet. If you jump out the window at the 42nd floor and you're still doing fine as you pass the 27th floor, that doesn't mean you don't have a serious problem. I would want to address the problem right now."
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"Well the open-outcry auction is just made to turn the brain into mush: you've got social proof, the other guy is bidding, you get reciprocation tendency, you get deprival super-reaction syndrome, the thing is going away... I mean it just absolutely is designed to manipulate people into idiotic behavior."
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"We try more to profit from always remembering the obvious than from grasping the esoteric."
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"It’s waiting that helps you as an investor, and a lot of people just can’t stand to wait. If you didn’t get the deferred-gratification gene, you’ve got to work very hard to overcome that."
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"Most people are too fretful, they worry to much. Success means being very patient, but aggressive when it's time."
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"I think the reason why we got into such idiocy in investment management is best illustrated by a story that I tell about the guy who sold fishing tackle. I asked him, "My God, they're purple and green. Do fish really take these lures?" And he said, "Mister, I don't sell to fish." Investment managers are in the position of that fishing tackle salesman."
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"If you don't keep learning, other people will pass you by. Temperament alone won't do it - you need a lot of curiosity for a long, long time."
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"The secret to happiness is to lower your expectations. ...that is what you compare your experience with. If your expectations and standards are very high and only allow yourself to be happy when things are exquisite, you'll never be happy and grateful. There will always be some flaw. But compare your experience with lower expectations, especially something not as good, and you'll find much in your experience of the world to love, cherish and enjoy, every single moment."
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"The investment game always involves considering both quality and price, and the trick is to get more quality than you pay for in price. It's just that simple."
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"Acknowledging what you don't know is the dawning of wisdom."
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"If you want to understand science, you have to understand math. In business, if you're enumerate, you're going to be a klutz. The good thing about business is that you don't have to know any higher math."
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"People have always had this craving to have someone tell them the future. Long ago, kings would hire people to read sheep guts. There's always been a market for people who pretend to know the future. Listening to today's forecasters is just as crazy as when the king hired the guy to look at the sheep guts."
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