Warren Buffett Investing Quotes on Simplicity, Price, Value, and Wisdom

Sometimes, some guys just say it better than me. Here’s some great investing quotes from one of the world’s best investor himself, Warren Buffett.

  • “Rule No. 1: never lose money; rule No. 2: don’t forget rule No. 1”
  • “Investors should remember that excitement and expenses are their enemies. And if they insist on trying to time their participation in equities, they should try to be fearful when others are greedy and greedy only when others are fearful.”
  • “Time is the friend of the wonderful business, the enemy of the mediocre.”
investing quotes


(Insider Monkey)

  • “Never give up searching for the job that you’re passionate about. Try to find the job you’d have if you were independently rich. Forget about the pay. When you’re associating with the people that you love, doing what you love, it doesn’t get any better than that.”
  • “You don’t need to be a rocket scientist. Investing is not a game where the guy with the 160 IQ beats the guy with 130 IQ.”
  • “Wall Street is the only place that people ride to in a Rolls-Royce to get advice from those who take the subway.”

Investing Quotes: Simplicity

  • “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.”
  • “It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it. If you think about that, you’ll do things differently.”
  • “The line separating investment and speculation, which is never bright and clear, becomes blurred still further when most market participants have recently enjoyed triumphs. Nothing sedates rationality like large doses of effortless money. After a heady experience of that kind, normally sensible people drift into behavior akin to that of Cinderella at the ball. They know that overstaying the festivities — that is, continuing to speculate in companies that have gigantic valuations relative to the cash they are likely to generate in the future — will eventually bring on pumpkins and mice. But they nevertheless hate to miss a single minute of what is one helluva party. Therefore, the giddy participants all plan to leave just seconds before midnight. There’s a problem, though: They are dancing in a room in which the clocks have no hands.”

Investing: Price vs. Value

  • “It’s far better to buy a wonderful company at a fair price than a fair company at a wonderful price.”
  • “Do a lot of reading.” (to learn the value of a business)
  • “When we own portions of outstanding businesses with outstanding managements, our favorite holding period is forever.”
  • “None of this means, however, that a business or stock is an intelligent purchase simply because it is unpopular; a contrarian approach is just as foolish as a follow-the-crowd strategy. What’s required is thinking rather than polling. Unfortunately, Bertrand Russell’s observation about life in general applies with unusual force in the financial world: “Most men would rather die than think. Many do.”
  • “I do not like debt and do not like to invest in companies that have too much debt, particularly long-term debt. With long-term debt, increases in interest rates can drastically affect company profits and make future cash flows less predictable.“
  • “Our approach is very much profiting from lack of change rather than from change. With Wrigley chewing gum, it’s lack of change that appeals to me. I don’t think it is going to be hurt by the Internet. That’s the kind of business I like.”

Investing Quotes: Wisdom

  • “After all, you only find out who is swimming naked when the tide goes out.”
  • “Investors making purchases in an overheated market need to recognize that it may often take an extended period for the value of even an outstanding company to catch up with the price they paid.”
  • “I never buy anything unless I can fill out on a piece of paper my reasons. I may be wrong, but I would know the answer to that …I’m paying $32 billion today for the Coca Cola Company because… If you can’t answer that question, you shouldn’t buy it. If you can answer that question, and you do it a few times, you’ll make a lot of money.“
  • “I try to buy stock in businesses that are so wonderful that an idiot can run them. Because sooner or later, one will.”
  • “The best thing that happens to us is when a great company gets into temporary trouble…We want to buy them when they’re on the operating table.”
  • “The fact that people will be full of greed, fear, or folly is predictable. The sequence is not predictable.“

Long Term Investing

  • “Over the long term, the stock market news will be good. In the 20th century, the United States endured tow world wars and other traumatic and expensive military conflicts; the Depression; a dozen or so recessions and financial panics; oil shocks; a fly epidemic; and the resignation of a disgraced president. Yet the Dow rose from 66 to 11,497.”
  • “Your goal as an investor should simply be to purchase, at a rational price, a part interest in an easily-understandable business whose earnings are virtually certain to be materially higher five, ten and twenty years from now. Over time, you will find only a few companies that meet these standards – so when you see one that qualifies, you should buy a meaningful amount of stock. You must also resist the temptation to stray from your guidelines: If you aren’t willing to own a stock for ten years, don’t even think about owning it for ten minutes. Put together a portfolio of companies whose aggregate earnings march upward over the years, and so also will the portfolio’s market value.”
  • “Chains of habits are too light to be felt until they are too heavy to be broken.”
  • “The stock market is a no-called-strike game. You don’t have to swing at everything–you can wait for your pitch. The problem when you’re a money manager is that your fans keep yelling, ‘Swing, you bum!”

Best Value Investing Quote

  • “Whether we’re talking about socks or stocks, I like buying quality merchandise when it is marked down.”

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