Charlie Munger

Charlie Munger

Investor, Businessman

Charlie Munger is a prominent investor and vice chairman of Berkshire Hathaway, known for his insights on rational decision-making and multidisciplinary learning.

Thinking People Investing Long Ideas Years
Born
August 1, 1924
Quotes
517
Rank
#309

Quote collection

Charlie Munger quotes (page 6 of 26)

517 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.

Charlie Munger Investor, Businessman
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"Our approach has worked for us. Look at the fun we, our managers, and our shareholders are having. More people should copy us. It's not difficult, but it looks difficult because it's unconventional - it isn't the way things are normally done. We have low overhead, don't have quarterly goals and budgets or a standard personnel system, and our investing is much more concentrated than average. It's simple and common sense."

Fun Simple Average
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"Projections are put together by people who have an interest in a particular outcome, have a subconscious bias, and its apparent precision makes it fallacious. They remind me of Mark Twain's saying, 'A mine is a hole in the ground owned by a liar.' Projections in America are often a lie, although not an intentional one, but the worst kind because the forecaster often believes them himself."

Liars Lying Believe
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"Remember that reputation and integrity are your most valuable assets - and can be lost in a heartbeat."

Integrity Reputation Remember
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"For some odd reason, I had an early and extreme multidisciplinary cast of mind. I couldn't stand reaching for a small idea in my own discipline when there was a big idea right over the fence in somebody else's discipline. So I just grabbed in all directions for the big ideas that would really work."

Ideas Discipline Mind
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"If you buy something because it's undervalued, then you have to think about selling it when it approaches your calculation of its intrinsic value. That's hard. But if you buy a few great companies, then you can sit on your ass. That's a good thing."

Thinking Ass Selling
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"Clever derivatives broke dozens of companies. It killed them. Bankrupt. We don't need these kinds of innovation in finance. It's OK to be boring in finance. What we want is innovation in widgets."

Clever Innovation Needs
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"The interesting thing about it to me is the mindset. With all these "helpers" running around, they talk about doing deals. We talk about welcoming partners. The guy doing deals, he wants to do a deal and then unwind it in the near future. It's totally opposite for us. We like to build lasting relationships. I think our system will work better in the long term than flipping deals. I think there are so many of them [helpers] that they'll get in ea h other's way. I don't think they'll make enough money to meet their expectations, by flipping, flipping, flipping."

Running Thinking Opposites
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"Acquire worldly wisdom and adjust your behavior accordingly. If your new behavior gives you a little temporary unpopularity with your peer group then to hell with them."

Giving Littles Groups
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"To us, investing is the equivalent of going out and betting against the pari-mutuel system. We look for a horse with one chance in two of winning, and that pays three to one. In other words, we're looking for a mispriced gamble. That's what investing is, and you have to know enough to know whether the gamble is mispriced."

Horse Winning Two
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"Mankind invented a system to cope with the fact that we are so intrinsically lousy at manipulating numbers. It's called the graph."

Numbers Investing Facts
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"A rough rule in life is that an organization foolish in one way in dealing with a complex system is all too likely to be foolish in another."

Organization Way Life Is
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"It's a finite and very competitive world. All large aggregations of capital eventually find it hell on earth to grow and thus find a lower rate of return."

World Earth Return
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"I also want to raise the possibility that there are, in the very long term, "virtue effects" in economics- for instance that widespread corrupt accounting will eventually create bad long term consequences as a sort of obverse effect from the virtue-based boost double-entry book-keeping gave to the heyday of Venice. I suggest that when the financial scene starts reminding you of Sodomand Gomorrah, you should fear practical consequences even if you like to participate in what is going on."

Book Venice Long
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"Wesco had a market capitalization of $40 million when we bought it [in the early 1970s]. It's $2 billion now. It's been a long slog to a perfectly respectable outcome - not as good as Berkshire Hathaway or Microsoft, but there's always someone in life who's done better."

Long Microsoft Done
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"You're looking for a mispriced gamble. That's what investing is. And you have to know enough to know whether the gamble is mispriced. That's value investing."

Investing Enough Gamble
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"Economic systems work better when there's an extreme reliability ethos. And the traditional way to get a reliability ethos, at least in past generations in America, was through religion. The religions instilled guilt. ... And this guilt, derived from religion, has been a huge driver of a reliability ethos, which has been very helpful to economic outcomes for man."

Past Men Ethos
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"Berkshireis in the business of making easy predictions If a deal looks too hard, the partners simply shelve it."

Looks Easy Predictions
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"We're the tortoise that has outrun the hare because it chose the easy predictions."

Tortoises Easy Predictions
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"...People need to ask, "How do I play the hand that has been dealt me?" The world is not going to give you extra return just because you want it. You have to be very shrewd and hard working to get a little extra. It's so much easier to reduce your wants. There are a lot of smart people and a lot of them cheat, so it's not easy to win."

Smart Hard Work Winning
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"We believe that almost all really good investment records will involve relatively little diversification. The basic idea that it was hard to find good investments and that you wanted to be in good investments, and therefore, you'd just find a few of them that you knew a lot about and concentrate on those seemed to me such an obviously good idea. And indeed, it's proven to be an obviously good idea. Yet 98% of the investing world doesn't follow it. That's been good for us."

Believe Ideas Insightful
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