I will tell you how to become rich. Close the doors. Be fearful when others are greedy. Be greedy when others are fearful.
Draw a circle around the businesses you understand and then eliminate those that fail to qualify on the basis of value, good management, and limited exposure to hard times.
But then it dawned on me that the opinion of someone who is always wrong has its own special utility to decision-makers.
The unsophisticated investor who is realistic about his shortcomings is likely to obtain better long-term results than the knowledgeable professional who is blind to even a single weakness.
Having firstrate people on the team is more important than designing hierarchies and clarifying who reports to whom.
What we do is not beyond anybody else's competence. I feel the same way about managing that I do about investing: it's just not necessary to do extraordinary things to get extraordinary results.
If each of us hires people who are smaller than we are, we shall become a company of dwarfs. But, if each of us hires people who are bigger than we are, we shall become a company of giants.
Success in investing doesn't correlate with IQ once you're above the level of 25. Once you have ordinary intelligence, what you need is the temperament to control the urges that get other people into trouble in investing.
Culture, more than rule books, determines how an organisation behaves.
The best way to think about investments is to be in a room with no one else and to just think. If that doesn't work, nothing else is going to work.
When a person with money meets a person with experience, the one with experience ends up with the money and the one with money leaves with experience.
In the investment world, if you had a punch card when you got out of school, and there were only 20 punches on it, and when that was done, you were all done investing, you'd make more money than having one with unlimited punches. You'd make sure you used them for the right things.