Time Horizon

“Having a long term strategy may seem a quaint idea in a market dominated by high frequency trading, the 24 hour news cycle, the ubiquitous and shrill blogosphere, flash crashes, and where it is repeated as though divinely given that buy and hold is dead.”

“Our memory provides continuity and context to our daily activities, enabling us to recognize familiar situations, see their similarities and differences, integrate experience into a broader context, draw lessons from the past, and so on. Investment memory, though, seems considerably more short-term, selective, and sub-optimal.”

“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.”

“As long-term investors, we position portfolios for the 95% of the time the economy is growing, not the unforecastable 5% when it is not.”

“The biggest problem that people have isn’t selecting the right money managers. It’s the way they change managers all the time in response to fluctuations of short-term performance.”

“Valuation is determined by the relation between a stock price and the present value of the free cash the business will generate over one’s forecast time horizon. The problem comes with assessing the future free cash flow. It is a highly subjective and uncertain exercise.”

“The market teaches patience by punishing impatience”

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

“I think I’m pretty good at long run expectations, but I don’t think I’m good at short-term wobbles. I don’t have the faintest idea what’s going to happen short term.”

“If you’re going to invest in stocks for the long term, or real estate, of course, there are going to be periods when there’s a lot of agony and other periods when there’s a boom. I think you just have to learn to live through them.”

“Over the long-term, big companies of America behave more like biology than they do anything else. In biology, all the individuals die and so do all the species. It’s just a question of time. And that’s pretty well what happens in the economy too.”

“Good investing requires a weird combination of patience and aggression. And not many people have it.”

“Money managers are not stupid. They realize that sticking one’s neck out and producing short-term under performance that differs from an index that is used as the benchmark is risky.”

“Every basis point of return — let alone every 100 basis points — has a staggering difference in outcomes in the long run. That’s why you stay focused on the long term and the rate of return; that is where the difference is, that is what you want and need to capture.”

“If you’re investing with a long time horizon, having an equity bias makes sense; stocks go up in the long run.”

“I believe denying clients the ability to be hyper-traders is doing them a favor. Most people are not adept enough to take advantage of short-term mis-valuations, and I put myself in that category.”

“I believe it is highly possible to improve your long-term results by adjusting your investment position at the extremes of the cycle. Not that often. But at the extremes.”

“Risk to us goes back to not paying attention to how one does in the short term.”

“If you are a long term investor, you don’t have to worry about market psychology.”

“When it comes to long-term investing, doing “less” is often “more.””

“The actual results of an investment over a long term of years very seldom agree with the initial expectation.”

“Patience is not passive — it is disciplined.”

“Most investors fail not from ignorance, but from impatience.”

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

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

“Patience is a competitive advantage.”

“Attempting to guess short-term swings in individual stocks, the stock market or the economy is not likely to produce consistently good results. Short-term developments are too unpredictable.”

“Good investing requires humility and patience.”

“Patience is a competitive advantage”

“Long-term value creation is nonlinear.”

“The market rewards patience unevenly but powerfully.”

“Great businesses think in decades, not quarters.”

“Liquidity is a concern of the short-term investor and a minor matter for the long-term investor.”

“So long as a capitalist system persists and the financial markets hold together, equities do have a built-in long-term rate of return. That rate of return is a nominal measure of the economy.”

“No matter how calm you are, no matter how long term an investor you are, no matter what your horizons, when the market is jumping around, you feel uncertainty in your gut and it’s hard to resist that.”

“Many people pride themselves on being “long-term investors,” but acting deliberately when prices are bouncing around is not so easy.”

“I don’t think volatility is an altogether irrelevant proxy for risk, even though, to a cool, dispassionate investor with a long-term time horizon, volatility is wonderful.”

“The mantra is patience, patience and more patience. Think long-term and remember that the big rewards accrue with compound annual rates of return.”

“Long-term thinking creates strategic freedom”

“You only need one or two good stocks a decade. You don’t need a lot of action.”

“Long-term bonds can be almost as volatile as stocks. They have their own corrections.”

“You can’t go to sleep holding cyclical stocks for a decade and expect to be richly rewarded. The rich rewards are in growth stocks and special situations.”

“Everybody in the world is a long-term investor until the market goes down.”

“Everyone says they’re a long-term investor until the market has one of its major corrections.”

“The real problem is not finding a good fund manager, it’s finding the right time horizon for your investing and what your temperament is for volatility.”

“If a company has a sound balance sheet with minimal long-term debt, good growth prospects and responsible management, then the stock should be interesting.”

“I know plenty of guys who consider themselves to be long-term investors but who are still perfectly happy to trade in and out and back into their favorite stocks.”

“Institutional investing, as it is structured today, simply makes it more difficult to make a high-conviction, long-term decision than to make a low-conviction, short-term decision. The rewards of short-term results substantially superior to the market, and the penalties of short-term results well below the market, are awesome.”

“To beat the market is not easy. In addition to a good investment manager, the investor needs perspective, patience, and courage — qualities that do not abound in today’s intensely competitive world.”

“The ability to not be getting margin calls, not be having redemptions, not be scared out of your mind when something’s gone against you is probably the most enhancing thing to long term returns.”

“Consistency and patience are crucial. Most investors are their own worst enemies. Endurance enables compounding.”

“Avoiding round trips and short-term devastation enables you to be around for the long term.”

“If the stock market has a period of outperformance of its long-term return, it is inevitably followed by some period of underperformance. But people being optimistic and greedy by nature take the recent short-term outperformance of stocks as a sign of good things to come, rather than a warning of bad things to come.”

“People who chase growth, who chase highfliers, inevitably lose because they paid a premium price. They lose to the people who have more patience and more discipline.”

“It turns out that value investing is something that is in your blood. There are people who just don’t have the patience and discipline to do it, and there are people who do. So it leads me to think it’s genetic.”

“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.”

“The first thing I heard when I got in the business, not from my mentor, was bulls make money, bears make money, and pigs get slaughtered. I’m here to tell you I was a pig. And I strongly believe the only way to make long-term returns in our business that are superior is by being a pig.”

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

“Detecting with a high degree of accuracy when the long-term earnings growth of a company has ceased is difficult because no mathematical formula can be applied to determine when the change from growth to maturity or decadence occurs.”

“When picking a list of growth stocks for long-term investment, broad diversification of the risk is the first and most important principle to follow. No one can look ahead five or ten years and say what is the most promising industry or the best stock to own.”

““Growth stocks” can be defined as shares in business enterprises which have demonstrated favorable underlying long-term growth in earnings and which, after careful research study, give indications of continued secular growth in the future.”

“Earnings of most corporations pass through a life cycle which, like the human cycle, has three important phases — growth, maturity, and decadence.”

“Once a business is well established, the greatest opportunity for gain is afforded during the period of growth in earning power. The risk factor increases when maturity is reached and decadence begins.”

“An old saying is that in a bull market, your time horizons grow longer and longer. In a bear market, they grow shorter and shorter.”

“I think people trade too much, looking for short-term gains. But I don’t think you should hold stocks indefinitely.”

“I am willing to trade the pains (forget about the pleasures) of substantial short term variance in exchange for maximization of long term performance. However, I am not willing to incur risk of substantial permanent capital loss in seeking to better long term performance.”

“Market prices for stocks fluctuate at great amplitudes around intrinsic value but, over the long term, intrinsic value is virtually always reflected at some point in market price.”

“The inescapable fact is that the value of an asset, whatever its character, cannot over the long term grow faster than its earnings do.”

“Uncertainty actually is the friend of the buyer of long-term values.”