Selling

“Some people are not congenitally equipped to sell short. It goes against their psychological makeup.”

“Selling is difficult, and my track record suggests it’s usually a mistake”

“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.”

“Economist picture a thousand buyers and sellers congregating in the market place to match their keen wits and finally evolve the correct price for each commodity. In the securities market particularly, the word of the ticker is accepted as law, so that one often thinks of prices as determining values, instead of vice-versa.”

“The only significance of stock market gyrations to the true investor is that they give him an opportunity to buy good common stocks when they are cheap — or at least reasonably priced — and at times offer him an invitation to sell out at temptingly high levels.”

“Most people sell stocks at low prices not because they have to but because they are scared.”

“Good common stocks are investment media which are subject to speculative influences. The speculative influences are not in the common stocks; they are in the minds of the people who buy and sell them.”

“The stock market registers the judgments of multitudes of buyers and sellers about the many factors which affect business — what business is like today; what it will be like in the future.”

“Two things seem pretty clear to me: first, no one can consistently buy at the low or sell at the high (except liars, as Bernard Baruch said), and second, lowest average cost wins.”

“For most investors in general, selling the expensive asset, and buying the cheap asset, seems like a logical strategy — except when you actually try to do it. Because most people are actually not wired to be selling what’s expensive and going up, and buying what’s cheap and going down.”

“It’s absolute cockamamie crazy to sell stocks after they drop. Instead, you should say, “Today there’s a first-rate bargain and I’m buying.””

“I think you should try and make your money in this world by selling other people things that are good for them. If you’re selling them gambling services where you rake profits off of the top, like many of these new brokers who specialize in luring the gamblers in, I think it’s a dirty way to make money and I think that we’re crazy to allow it.”

“If you are selling because of a missed earnings report or the trend of the market or something, you’ve stopped looking at the rate of return the company can achieve over time.”

“In any diversified portfolio, there will be both winners and losers, and the consideration that should determine which you should sell, if any, is certainly not the price at which you bought it originally.”

“When deciding to sell, people have control over whether to give themselves pleasure or give themselves pain, and they tend to give themselves pleasure. In other words, they tend to sell winners and hang on to losers. It turns out to be a bad idea.”

“It turns out that when people have to sell a stock from their portfolio, they are not rational between winners and losers. People tend to sell winners and hang on to their losers. The psychology of that is quite straightforward.”

“The investor is bombarded with staggering amounts of information, staggering amounts of stimuli that are designed to get the investor to buy and sell and trade, to do exactly the wrong thing, to create excessive profits for these intermediaries that aren’t acting in the investor’s best interests.”

“I think I am safe in asserting that the margin trader, speculator, gambler, or whatever you choose to designate the average man who goes to Wall Street after easy money, does not lose money when he sells. He loses it when he buys!”

“You can make more money buying at the bottom than selling at the top.”

“Buy when others are selling, and hold when others are afraid”

“I believe the reasons for selling a stock should be harmonized with the reasons for buying it.”

“In the end, we have to sell when basically the reasons for purchasing a company in the first place are not valid anymore.”

“The complexity of the world in which we live exceeds our capacity to comprehend it.”

“There is no great secret in fortune making. All you have to do is to buy cheap and sell dear, act with thrift and shrewdness and then be persistent.”

“Selling an asset is a decision that absolutely must not be considered in isolation.”

“A chief cause of crises, panics, runs on banks, etc., is that risks are not independently reckoned, but are a mere matter of imitation. A crisis is a time of general and forced liquidation.”

“Complexity is often used to hide the truth”

“Short sellers are the canaries in the coal mine”

“Of all the mysteries of the stock exchange there is none so impenetrable as why there should be a buyer for everyone who seeks to sell. October 24, 1929 showed that what is mysterious is not inevitable. Often there were no buyers, and only wide vertical declines could anyone be induced to bid.”

“A lot of people can’t bear to sell when a stock’s price is going up. They’re convinced that they’ve made a mistake if they don’t hold out for the last dollar.”

“There will be bear markets about twice every 10 years and recessions about twice every 10 or 12 years but nobody has been able to predict them reliably. So the best thing to do is to buy when shares are thoroughly depressed and that means when other people are selling.”

“When people are desperately trying to sell, I buy. When people are desperately trying to buy, I sell. It has worked out very well over the years.”

“Through reluctance to sell, more than one investor has avoided the capital gains tax but lost the capital gain itself.”

“The big money is not in the buying and selling, but in the waiting.”

“Buy when everyone else is selling.”

“We do not have any hard and fast rules on selling. We do not sell that well.”

“If I’ve made one mistake in the course of managing investments it was selling really good companies too soon. Because generally, if you’ve made good investments, they will last for a long time.”

“We don’t get involved in all the analytical baggage of trying to figure out where a stock is going to sell. Just try to figure out what it’s worth. And I dare say all the really great investors do it the same way.”

“You know, we make mistakes. Some go from 12 to 10 and we sell them. Some go from 20 to nothing. In a 10-year period, you are going to have one or two that go from 20 to nothing. If you have more, it is bad.”

“It is not the market that is rising or falling at any moment, even if we commonly speak as though it were. In truth, prices move in response to the buying and selling decisions of countless investors, who are constantly considering the likely decisions of countless others”

“Liquidity does not exist unless someone else is willing to give you cash in exchange for the piece of paper you want to sell.”

“Volatility matters, because it defines the uncertainty of the price at which an asset will be liquidated.”

“Financial markets are a kind of time machine that allows selling investors to compress the future into the present and buying investors to stretch the present into the future.”

“When there’s a war going on, don’t buy the companies that are doing the fighting; buy the companies that sell the bullets.”

“People who exit the stock market to avoid a decline are odds-on favorites to miss the next rally.”

“Corrections are unpredictable. By selling stocks to avoid pain, you can miss the next gain.”

“As corporate profits increase, corporations become more valuable, and sooner or later, their shares will sell for a higher price.”

“Suppose you bought a stock cheap when it was a relatively obscure situation, and then a half-dozen Wall Street firms started cheering for the stock at the same time. I’d get concerned and think about selling. I don’t like bandwagons. I’d rather do my own thing.”

“It’s extremely difficult to figure out when to sell anything. So I’d rather have the stock taken away from me in a merger or a buyout. It’s much easier.”

“The general state of business thus does not forecast the course of stock prices except in the apparently paradoxical fashion that great prosperity affords an advantageous time for selling stocks, extreme business depression an opportunity for purchase.”

“Stocks often sell at ridiculously low levels for considerable periods merely because few people know anything about them.”

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

“My stocks sometimes get overpriced, but in the long run this kind of company, if you can find it, will outperform the market and the economy. The worst thing you can do is try to catch the swings, sell out too soon and be afraid to buy back in.”

“It is just appalling the nerve strain people put themselves under trying to buy something today and sell it tomorrow. It’s a small-win proposition. If you are a truly long-range investor, of which I am practically a vanishing breed, the profits are so tremendously greater.”

“Market inefficiencies, like tax selling and window dressing, also create mindless selling, as can the deletion of a stock from an index. These causes of mispricing are deep-rooted in human behavior and market structure, unlikely to be extinguished anytime soon.”

“Being extremely early is tantamount to being wrong, so contrarians are well advised to develop an understanding of the psychology of the sellers.”

“We consider for each of our investments not only whether a security is undervalued but why it is undervalued. If the reason is that there are uninformed or emotional sellers, we become more comfortable.”

“People seeking answers to why the market plunged usually emphasize the immediate events that precipitated a selling panic, when in fact these events are but minor symptoms of much more severe underlying problems.”

“Short sellers are the market’s police officers. If short selling were to go away, the market would levitate even more than it currently does.”

“Price is the essential determinant in every investment equation. At some price, every company is a buy; at some price, every company is a hold; and at a still higher price, every company is a sell. We do not really recognize the concept of a value company.”

“We don’t buy and sell stocks based upon what other people think the stock market is going to do (I never have an opinion) but rather upon what we think the company is going to do.”

“The best kind of business to be in is something where you sell something that costs a penny and sells for a dollar and is habit forming.”