Tom Gayner

“One of the things you should always be doing with your circles of competence is see if you can push it a little bit more, because the world changes. It keeps spinning, and things don’t stay the same, so you always need to be working and learning and studying to make sure that your circles of competence are relevant.”

“I’ve always said you might as well assume the world is going to work, because if it doesn’t, it doesn’t really matter what your investment portfolio looks like.”

“Equities are congealed intellectual capital and that is what I want.”

“Making time work for you, with steady inflows of permanent capital, really helps investment returns over time.”

“I’ve made so many mistakes over the years that I struggle to isolate just one as the biggest single mistake. Among the choices though I think excessive leverage has been the most personally painful.”

“The more a business serves others, and the more problems they solve, the more profitable they will be and the more an investor in those enterprises should make.”

“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.”

“It’s a personal quirk of mine that when the CEO shows up on magazine covers as a celebrity, I’m automatically hesitant to invest in the stock.”

“What publicly-traded companies are worth is roughly 90% dominated by the cash flows they produce over time and 10% by what the market will pay for these types of companies at any given time.”

“The worst business in the world is the one that doesn’t earn good returns on capital but still needs gobs of it going forward.”

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