Principles of Investing
— by Chris Gottscho
"There are two times in a man’s life when he should not speculate – when he can’t afford it, and when he can."
- Mark Twain
"The best performance is produced by a person, not a committee."
- John Templeton
"The big money is not in the buying and selling, but in the waiting."
- Charlie Munger
"I skate to where the puck is going, not to where it has been."
- Wayne Gretzky
"Don’t underestimate the value of doing nothing!"
- A.A. Milne (the creator of that wise bear,
Winnie the Pooh)
"There is nothing sinister in so arranging one’s affairs as to keep taxes as low as possible."
- Judge Learned Hand
"Rule No. 1 Never Lose Money. Rule No. 2: Never Forget Rule No. 1."
- Warren Buffett
"I never buy at the bottom, and I always sell too soon."
- the original Baron Rothschild
"Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is an absurd one."
- Voltaire
"In my whole life, I have known no wise people … who didn’t read all the time – none, zero."
- Charlie Munger
"Because technology changes a ton, what I focus on is what won't change."
- Jeff Bezos
"Keep your thinking clean to make it simple."
- Steve Jobs
"People assume they are most creative at a certain age. But if you look at truly great artists, they always get better. Matisse got better. Picasso got better. Da Vinci got better. I think it’s the same in all areas of creativity."
- Jeff Koons
"I look for economic castles protected by unbreachable moats."
- Warren Buffett
"You don’t need to know a man’s weight to know that he’s fat."
- Benjamin Graham
"I write in order to understand as much as to be understood."
- Elie Wiesel
"Never invest in any idea you can’t illustrate with a crayon."
- Peter Lynch
"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."
- George Santayana
"Real knowledge is to know the extent of one's ignorance."
- Confucius
"I can calculate the movement of stars, but not the madness of men."
- Sir Isaac Newton
"Everyone has a plan ‘till they get punched in the face."
- Mike Tyson
"Nurture your flowers and cut your weeds."
- 1800s Industrialist Proverb
"I'm only rich because I know when I'm wrong. "
- George Soros
"Nothing is a waste of time if you use the experience wisely."
- Auguste Rodin
"View a stock as an ownership of the business and judge the staying quality of the business in terms of its competitive advantage."
- Charlie Munger
"It is impossible to produce a superior performance unless you do something different from the majority."
- John Templeton
"Read 500 pages every week. That’s how knowledge works. It builds up, like compound interest. All of you can do it, but I guarantee not many of you will."
- Warren Buffett
"Don’t look for the bad. Look for the good."
- Sam Walton
"If you build a great experience, customers tell each other about that. Word of mouth is very powerful."
- Jeff Bezos
"The concerns which fail are those which have scattered their capital, which means that they have scattered their brains also. ‘Don’t put all your eggs in one basket’ is all wrong … ‘Put all your eggs in one basket, and then watch that basket.’"
- Andrew Carnegie
"The purpose of economists is to make astrology look good."
- John Kenneth Galbraith
"All of us would be better investors if we just made fewer decisions."
- Daniel Kahneman
"As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain; and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality."
- Albert Einstein
"Few people think more than two or three times a year; I have made an international reputation for myself by thinking once or twice a week."
- George Bernard Shaw
"Investment is most intelligent when it is most businesslike."
- Benjamin Graham
"Common sense is not so common."
- Voltaire
"The greatest lesson in life is to know that even fools are right sometimes."
- Winston Churchill
"Through the vicissitudes of wars, panics and depressions, investment in America’s growth and development has never proven a mistake."
- Malcolm Forbes
"What matters isn't how well you play when you're playing well. What matters is how well you play when you're playing badly."
- Martina Navratilova
"Out of clutter, find simplicity. From discord, find harmony. In the middle of difficulty lies opportunity. "
- Albert Einstein
"If you don't have time to do it right, when will you have time to do it over?"
- John Wooden
"My biggest mistake was that I always sold stocks way too early."
- Peter Lynch
"Every age has its peculiar folly: some scheme, project, or fantasy which it plunges, spurred on by the love of gain, the necessity of excitement, or the mere force of imitation."
- Charles Mackay
"Anyone who says businessmen deal only in facts, not fiction, has never read old five-year projections."
- Malcolm Forbes
"Don't let the noise of others' opinion drown out your own inner voice. Everything else is secondary."
- Steve Jobs
"It's obvious that if a company generates high returns on capital and reinvests at high returns, it will do well. But this wouldn't sell books, so there's a lot of twaddle and fuzzy concepts that have been introduced that don't add much. "
- Charlie Munger
"Most of the time common stocks are subject to irrational and excessive price fluctuation in both directions as a consequence of the ingrained tendency of most people to speculate or gamble…to give way to hope, fear and greed."
- Benjamin Graham
"Success is a lousy teacher. It seduces smart people into thinking they can't lose."
- Bill Gates
"If you have integrity, nothing else matters. If you don’t have integrity, nothing else matters."
- Senator Alan Simpson
"Our ideas are so simple. People keep asking us for mysteries, but all we have are the most elementary ideas."
- Charlie Munger
"Speculation buys up, in a very practical way, the intelligence of those involved. "
- John Kenneth Galbraith
"The four most expensive words in the English language are ‘this time it’s different. "
- John Templeton
"Champions keep playing until they get it right. "
- Billie Jean King
"It’s a basic fact of life that many things ‘everybody knows’ turn out to be wrong. "
- Jim Rogers
"Refuse to be stampeded. Do your own thinking. "
- B.C. Forbes
"The score takes care of itself."
- Bill Walsh
"Without continual growth and progress, such words as improvement, achievement and success have no meaning."
- Benjamin Franklin
"There's a negative correlation between the number of people making investment decisions and the results. If you have a lot of people involved, you tend to have the least competent person making the decision, because you need consensus."
- Lou Simpson
"Being short America has been a loser’s game, and it will continue to be a loser’s game."
- Warren Buffett
