Career

“Many business success stories are due at least in part to simple good luck.”

“Too many investors fail to follow some simple, time-tested tenets that improve the odds of achieving success and, at the same time, reduce the anxiety naturally associated with an uncertain undertaking.”

“There are no perfect one-decision answers to investment success.”

“While the Stock Exchange list exhibits the widest diversity, in both directions, between market prices and book values, the underlying explanation is simple enough. In general, prosperous enterprises sell for more than their assets, and unsuccessful ones sell for less.”

“There is a considerable tendency for common stock investors to do the greater part of their buying, both of “good” and “bad” securities, at high levels of the market. They are equally inclined to do the greater part of their selling at low levels of the market, a procedure which is not conducive to successful results.”

“The successful purchase of growth stocks requires two rather obvious conditions: First, that their prospect of growth be realized; and, second, that the market has not already pretty well discounted these growth prospects.”

“There are two requirements for success in Wall Street. One, you have to think correctly; and secondly, you have to think independently.”

“It may be that professionally managed funds are too large a part of the total picture to be able to outperform the market as a whole; it may also be true, as I suspect, that certain weaknesses in their basic principles of stock selection tend to offset the superior training, intelligence, and effort that they bring to this task.”

“One could say that my whole career in Wall Street proved one long process of education in human nature.”

“We believe successful investing involves anticipating change, not reacting to it.”

“While markets constantly change and adapt, grow ever more complicated, interconnected and global, the principles that underlie successful, long-term investing have remained pretty much the same as they have always been.”

“You will be wrong a lot. Success depends on how quickly you recognize it.”

“Benign neglect is the secret to long-term investing success.”

“All successful investment involves trying to get into something where it’s worth more than you’re paying.”

“If you want to succeed in investments, start early and try hard and keep doing it. All success comes that way, by and large.”

“I have made bad business decisions. You can’t live a successful life without doing some difficult things that go wrong. That’s just the nature of the game.”

“Modern life creates successful bureaucracy and successful bureaucracy breeds failure and stupidity.”

“It is one of the common pieces of Wall Street experience that when the public goes stock mad and the market leaders are filled with the arrogance of prolonged success, such little things as high money rates or decreases in earnings or unraised dividends have no instant effect on the market — that is, on the state of mind of the speculating public. In the end, of course, all violations of the fundamental laws of economic and financial common sense are paid for; but every bull thinks he will unload before the break.”

“I do not define my job in any rigid terms but in terms of having the freedom to do what seems to me to be in the best interests of the company at any time.”

“It’s not what you buy, it’s what you pay. And success in investing doesn’t come from buying good things, but from buying things well. And if you don’t know the difference, you’re in the wrong business.”

“I think that the business about volatility being risk is a con job which was perpetrated primarily because volatility is machinable.”

“The biggest enemy of investment success is the investor himself.”

“Investment success requires the ability to look wrong for a very long time”

“I think there is a mindset among many professional investors that if I go down the drain, well it is o.k. as long as everyone else is going down the drain with me.”

“One can predict the course of a comet more easily than one can predict the course of Citigroup’s stock. The attractiveness, of course, is that you can make more money successfully predicting a stock than you can a comet.”

“The secret to successful investing is relatively simple: Figure out the value of something and then pay a lot less.”

“People who have had success in other parts of their lives have difficulty accepting how much failure there is in the stock market.”

“Forecasting is a notoriously underpaid profession, and extremely risky to boot, so I avoid it.”

“When the capital development of a country becomes a by-product of the activities of a casino, the job is likely to be ill-done.”

“The game of professional investment is intolerably boring and overexacting to anyone who is entirely exempt from the gambling instinct; whilst he who has it must pay to this propensity the appropriate toll.”

“The influence on stock prices are so numerous and so complex that no person has ever been able to predict the trend of stock prices with consistent success.”

“Investing success comes from a few great decisions, not many average ones.”

“Formula for success: rise early, work hard, strike oil.”

“Success comes from patience, persistence, and perspiration.”

“If you want short-term excitement, investing is the wrong profession.”

“Past corporate successes are only frail guides to future good fortune.”

“The road to successful investing is paved with independence of spirit, decisiveness, and the courage of one’s convictions.”

“Job insecurity has been a problem for as long as people have depended on a paycheck.”

“I can’t say enough about the fact that earnings are the key to success in investing in stocks. No matter what happens to the market, the earnings will determine the results.”

“If your only reason for picking a stock is that an expert likes it, then what you really need is paid professional help.”

“In my investing career, the best gains usually have come in the third or fourth year, not in the third or fourth week or the third or fourth month.”

“The road to success in speculation is the study of values.”

“It’s my job to find unusual companies and then judge whether the price they’re selling at is too high.”

“Truth — more precisely, an accurate understanding of reality — is the essential foundation for success”

“I think you have to be an undying optimist, and perhaps a Pollyanna to enjoy and to be successful at managing common stock portfolios over a long period of time.”

“Most of the people who are successful in the market are basically optimists, and most of these people are very uncomfortable when they are on the short side.”

“There’s something intellectually much more intriguing about failure, which is knowable, rather than success, which is sort of unknowable.”

“When it is all said and done I am a professional opportunist. What has always intrigued and attracted me are scenarios where I believe there is significant inherent value beyond the price I am paying.”

“Investors who find an overly narrow niche to inhabit, prosper for a time but then usually stagnate. Those who move on when the world changes at least have the chance to adapt successfully.”

“The laws of probabilities tell us that almost anyone can achieve phenomenal success over any given measurement period. It is the task of those evaluating a money manager to ascertain how much of past success is due to luck and how much to skill.”

“It is always easiest to run with the herd; at times, it can take a deep reservoir of courage and conviction to stand apart from it. Yet distancing yourself from the crowd is an essential component of long-term investment success.”

“If you’re early on in your career and they give you a choice between a great mentor or higher pay, take the mentor every time. It’s not even close.”

“Value, not frequency of success, determines long-term results”

“Growth stocks are as varied in their characteristics as a surgeon’s instruments or a carpenter’s tools and, similarly, successful results are dependent on knowledge and experience in their proper use.”

“Successful investing requires the management of your own ego and temperament and usually that of your clients as well.”

“Most people who have been really successful in the securities markets say the same thing — that they’re not smart enough to get into the market and out of it. So they tend to remain more or less in the market at all times.”

“It is obvious that a variation of merely a few percentage points has an enormous effect on the success of a compounding (investment) program. It is also obvious that this effect mushrooms as the period lengthens.”

“I will not abandon a previous approach whose logic I understand even though it may mean foregoing large and apparently easy, profits to embrace an approach which I don’t fully understand, have not practiced successfully and which, possibly, could lead to substantial permanent loss of capital.”

“If you are not a professional investor, if your goal is not to manage money in such a way so you get a significantly better return than the world, then I believe in extreme diversification.”