Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
We call ourselves 'opportunistic value investors.'
Early in my career, we were just pure bottoms-up stock pickers.
Because I'm a very public figure, everybody knows what my returns are.
The potential rewards of small-cap investing do not come without risk.
It's critical to have a disciplined investing approach and stick with it.
We like to say we pray in the church of Graham, Dodd, Buffett, and Munger.
Even the greatest companies encounter problems or otherwise fall out of favour.
Many significant stock-price inefficiencies can occur when a company is spun off.
There's a real company in Facebook and then a lot of pretenders riding their coat tails.
I have long believed the corporate world is plagued by poor capital allocation decisions.
Independent thinking is not just helpful in becoming a successful investor, it’s required.
Well-managed companies with independent boards have nothing to fear from activist shareholders.
The key thing when you short is to make sure you're not wrong on the fundamental intrinsic value.
There is no sure-fire way to get rich quickly. In fact, the pursuit of that usually leads to ruin.
Assessing management quality is clearly one of the most important aspects of an investment decision.
Netflix is a better company with more upside than we had given it credit for than when we shorted it.
It's difficult to fix a truly broken business, but when it happens, the returns can be extraordinary.
If you are able to look beyond near term trouble, you have an advantage over many professional investors
I have never believed that large-cap stocks are too well followed to be anything but efficiently priced.
My advice to most people is don't short stocks. It's a very, very difficult business. And you can really get clobbered.
I love and celebrate good teachers, and it's critical that we do more to identify them and keep them happy and motivated.
I believe our schools will actually get better if layoffs are done carefully, such that only the very worst teachers are let go.
I have encountered thousands of value investors over the years and am constantly struck by their differences - and their similarities.
Without doubt, timely and democratic access to financial and market information contributes to smoothly functioning financial markets.
My experience is that very few people have what it takes to be a successful investor, as I discussed in The Arrogance of Stock Picking.
I think most people agree with the idea of shared sacrifice, but for many, when push comes to shove, that principle goes out the window.
The relative illiquidity of small-company shares - which often contributes to their being undervalued - also increases their volatility.
As in most subjects relating to money management, there's a wide diversity of opinion on portfolio concentration versus diversification.
Pence is far too conservative for me, but by all accounts, he's an intelligent, experienced, decent man with no skeletons in his closet.
My portfolio consists of many companies I find fundamentally undervalued in which I expect activism to play a role in the value being realised.
If you look at the history of technology gadget makers, hardware makers, it's littered with the corpses of Palm and RIM and companies like that.
The deal machinations many companies put themselves through, while certainly a bonanza for investment bankers, can confound the typical investor.
The mark of a wise person isn't never making mistakes - everyone makes plenty of them. Rather, it's the ability to quickly admit - and fix - them!
You just have to approach every day and say, 'If you were starting fresh today, what would my portfolio look like?' So that's how we think about it.
I am part of the 1 percent of the 1 percent. By that, I mean that I am fortunate to be a wealthy American, and I say, 'It's okay to raise my taxes.'
Humans are hard-wired to be irrational when it comes to financial decisions. We must understand that so we don't become the sucker at the poker table.
There are far too many ineffective teachers and, in particular, far too many truly terrible teachers who are harming children and poisoning the system.
What's both fascinating and challenging about investing is that the changing nature of business and finance means you can never have it all figured out.
The best way I know to get rich long-term is to invest prudently and conservatively and not try and get rich quick but try and get rich slowly, basically.
I think that most people who complain about our government have no idea what they're talking about because they've never been to a country with a bad government.
In the game of politics, both parties are sometimes guilty of passing really stupid laws that, in reality, are purely symbolic and have no real impact on anyone.
In life, an abundance of confidence gives us higher motivation, persistence, and optimism and can allow us to accomplish things we otherwise might not have undertaken.
Shorting saved my butt in 2008... Shorting kept me in the game. It generates cash when the market's crashing. And that's what you want when the market's crashing - cash.
The consequences of overestimating a company and your ability to analyse it are greatly diminished when you're paying a lot less for it than your analysis shows it is worth.
It's human nature: for most investors, the pain of stocks going down is more tangible than the joy of when they go up. The common impulse is to do something - anything - to minimise the pain.
To a large extent, equity investors put their hard-earned capital into the hands of management and count on it being employed skilfully and honestly. When that doesn't happen, losses typically follow.
Wall Street, in the main, hates uncertainty, which manifests itself in depressed share prices of companies whose prospects lack 'visibility.' But where the market can err is in confusing uncertainty with risk.
Small-company stocks, like any asset class, can get picked over from time to time, but there are fundamental reasons why diligently mining them with an eye for unrecognised value can get market-beating returns.
Just because a company's future is highly uncertain doesn't mean an investment in it is risky. In fact, some of the best potential investments are highly uncertain but have little risk of permanent capital loss.
To succeed as a contrarian you must recognize what the crowd believes, have concrete justification for why the majority is wrong, and have the patience and conviction to stick with what is, by definition, an unpopular bet.