"Consciously paying more for a stock than its calculated value - in the hope that it can soon be sold for a still-higher price - should be labelled speculation"
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Quote collection
Warren Buffett quotes (page 36 of 48)
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"Fund consultants like to require style boxes such as "long-short," "macro," "international equities." At Berkshire our only style box is "smart.""
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"We really can say no in 10 seconds or so to 90%+ of all the things that come along simply because we have these filters."
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"Well, it may be all right in practice, but it will never work in theory"
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"Anything can happen in stock markets and you ought to conduct your affairs so that if the most extraordinary events happen, that you're still around to play the next day."
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"You are neither right nor wrong because the crowd disagrees with you."
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"Banking is very good business if you don't do anything dumb."
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"Charlie and I decided long ago that in an investment lifetime, it's too hard to make hundreds of smart decisions. That judgment became ever more compelling as Berkshire's capital mushroomed and the universe of investments that could significantly affect our results shrank dramatically. Therefore, we adopted a strategy that required our being smart and not too smart at that, only a very few times. Indeed, we now settle for one good idea a year."
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"Either they're trying to con you or they're trying to con themselves."
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"I bought my first stock in 1942, in the summer of '42. I was 11 years old. And so 75 years have gone by. And I have never known what the market's going to do the next day. And that's not my game. My game is to decide whether I'm in the right economy, which America's definitely been ever since that time. The Dow has gone from 100 to 21,000 during that time. And no matter what the headlines say, or terrible things are happening - we were losing the war in the Pacific when I first bought stocks."
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"We still find very few [stocks] that even mildly interest us. That dismal fact is testimony to the insanity of valuations reached during The Great Bubble. Unfortunately, the hangover may prove to be proportional to the binge."
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"What's nice about investing is you don't have to swing at every pitch."
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"There is no perfect mathematical formula for pricing a business."
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"It makes a difference who the treasury secretary is."
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"It's better to build than to buy if you can find the right people."
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"Every company that has an economist working for him has one employee too many."
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"We can afford to lose money - even a lot of money. But we can't afford to lose reputation - even a shred of reputation."
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"An argument is made that there are just too many question marks about the near future; wouldn't it be better to wait until things clear up a bit? You know the prose: "Maintain buying reserves until current uncertainties are resolved," etc. Before reaching for that crutch, face up to two unpleasant facts: The future is never clear and you pay a very high price for a cheery consensus. Uncertainty actually is the friend of the buyer of long-term values."
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"In a commodity business, it's very hard to be smarter than your dumbest competitor."
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"AIG would be doing fine today. It was one of the ten largest companies in the United States in terms of market value, over 200 billion, the most respected insurer and everything in the world."
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