Quotes on Investing

Searching for companies is like looking for grubs under rocks: if you turn over 10 rocks you'll likely find one grub; if you turn over 20 rocks you'll find two.

All you need for a lifetime of successful investing is a few big winners, and the pluses from those will overwhelm the minuses from the stocks that don't work out.

Spend each day trying to be a little wiser than you were when you woke up.

The best stock to buy is the one you already own.

The ideal business is one that earns very high returns on capital and that keeps using lots of capital at those high returns. That becomes a compounding machine.

Bull-markets are born on pessimism, grow on skepticism, mature on optimism and die on euphoria.

When we call a capitalist society a consumers democracy we mean that the power to dispose of the means of production, which belongs to the entrepreneurs and capitalists, can only be acquired by means of the consumers ballot, held daily in the marketplace.

To restore America's competitiveness, we must recruit a new generation of science and technology leaders by investing in diversity.

Wealth and rank are what men desire, but unless they be obtained in the right way they may not be possessed. Poverty and obscurity are what men detest; but unless prosperity be brought about in the right way, they are not to be abandoned.

He who is greedy is always in want.

The returns from investing in poor people are just as great as the returns from investing in the business world... and have even more meaning

The farther backward you can look, the farther forward you can see.

In this business if you're good, you're right six times out of ten. You're never going to be right nine times out of ten.

If I am anything, which I highly doubt, I have made myself so by hard work.

The rich invest in time, the poor invest in money.

The Internet doesn't change everything. It doesn't change supply and demand. It doesn't magically allow you to build businesses by turning investors' money into operating expenses indefinitely. The money always runs out eventually.. the Internet doesn't change that, as we have seen.

SUPPOSE that an investor you admire and trust comes to you with an investment idea. This is a good one, he says enthusiastically. I'm in it, and I think you should be, too.

To invest successfully, you need not understand beta, efficient markets, modern portfolio theory, option pricing or emerging markets. You may, in fact, be better off knowing nothing of these. That, of course, is not the prevailing view at most business schools, whose finance curriculum tends to be dominated by such subjects. In our view, though, investment students need only two well-taught courses - How to Value a Business, and How to Think About Market Prices.

Once your soul has been enlarged by a truth, it can never return to its original size.

The ability to say no is a tremendous advantage for an investor.

Most of the time common stocks are subject to irrational and excessive price fluctuations in both directions as the consequence of the ingrained tendency of most people to speculate or gamble... to give way to hope, fear and greed.