Top 100 Warren Buffett Investing Quotes
#2. We really can say no in 10 seconds or so to 90%+ of all the things that come along simply because we have these filters.
Warren Buffett
#3. Does the business have a consistent operating history?
Warren Buffett
#4. By periodically investing in an index fund, the know-nothing investors can actually outperform most investment professionals.
Warren Buffett
#6. I think you should read everything you can. In my case, by the age of 10, I'd read every book in the Omaha public library about investing, some twice.
You need to fill your mind with various competing thoughts and decide which make sense.
Warren Buffett
#8. Anything can happen anytime in markets. And no advisor, economist, or TV commentator-and definitely not Charlie nor I-can tell you when chaos will occur. Market forecasters will fill your ear but will never fill your wallet.
Warren Buffett
#9. Opportunities come infrequently. When it rains gold, put out the bucket, not the thimble
Warren Buffett
#11. Investing in yourself is the best thing you can do. If you've got talents, no one can take them from you.
Warren Buffett
#12. Loss of focus is what most worries Charlie and me when we contemplate investing in businesses that in general look outstanding. All too often, we've seen value stagnate in the presence of hubris or of boredom that caused the attention of managers to wander.
Warren Buffett
#13. The fact that people will be full of greed, fear, or folly is predictable. The sequence is not predictable.
Warren Buffett
#14. The key to investing is not assessing how much an industry is going to affect society, or how much it will grow, but rather determining the competitive advantage of any given company and, above all, the durability of that advantage.
Warren Buffett
#15. In a commodity business, it's very hard to be smarter than your dumbest competitor.
Warren Buffett
#16. You're dealing with a lot of silly people in the marketplace; it's like a great big casino and everyone else is boozing. If you can stick with Pepsi, you should be O.K.
Warren Buffett
#17. Whether we're talking about socks or stocks, I like buying quality merchandise when it is marked down.
Warren Buffett
#18. If you expect to continue to purchase stocks throughout your life, you should welcome price declines as a way to add stocks more cheaply to your portfolio.
Warren Buffett
#19. 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.
Warren Buffett
#21. Calculate "owner earnings" to get a true reflection of value.
Warren Buffett
#22. In investing, just as in baseball, to put runs on the scoreboard, one must watch the playing field, not the scoreboard.
Warren Buffett
#23. Does management resist the institutional imperative?
Warren Buffett
#24. Success in investing doesn't correlate with I.Q. Once you are 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.
Warren Buffett
#25. We like to buy businesses, but we don't like to sell them.
Warren Buffett
#26. Lethargy, bordering on sloth should remain the cornerstone of an investment style.
Warren Buffett
#27. A great investment opportunity occurs when a marvelous business encounters a one-time huge, but solvable problem.
Warren Buffett
#28. Investing is forgoing consumption now in order to have the ability to consume more at a later date.
Warren Buffett
#29. If at first you do succeed, quit trying on investing.
Warren Buffett
#31. Warren Buffett has said many times that people either get value investing in five minutes or they won't get it in five years. So, there is something in the human brain, that for some of us, makes all the difference in the world right away and the patience it requires is part of the wiring process.
Mohnish Pabrai
#32. Investors ... can't pick stocks that are better than average. Stocks are a good thing to own over time. There's only two things you can do wrong: You can buy the wrong ones, and you can buy or sell them at the wrong time. And the truth is you never need to sell them.
Warren Buffett
#33. Nothing sedates rationality like large doses of effortless money.
Warren Buffett
#34. What's nice about investing is you don't have to swing at every pitch.
Warren Buffett
#35. If you have more than 120 or 130 I.Q. points, you can afford to give the rest away. You don't need extraordinary intelligence to succeed as an investor.
Warren Buffett
#36. When investing, pessimism is your friend, euphoria the enemy.
Warren Buffett
#37. It's nice to have a lot of money, but you know, you don't want to keep it around forever. I prefer buying things. Otherwise, it's a little like saving sex for your old age.
Warren Buffett
#38. When the brothel burns down, even the pretty girls have to run out.
Warren Buffett
#39. When they get their ego involved, people do things they shouldn't do.
Warren Buffett
#40. It's important to have the right monetary policy. It's important for, to have the right fiscal policy. But it's nowhere near as important as just the normal regenerative capacity of American capitalism.
Warren Buffett
#41. I always say that in investing you want to buy stock in a company that has a business that's so good that an idiot can run it, because sooner or later one will. We have a country like that.
Warren Buffett
#42. If you invested in a very low cost index fund - where you don't put the money in at one time, but average in over 10 years -you'll do better than 90% of people who start investing at the same time.
Warren Buffett
#43. Warren Buffett once wrote that value investing is like an inoculation
it either takes or it doesn't
and when you explain to somebody what it is and how it works and why it works and show them the returns, either they get it or they don't.
Seth Klarman
#44. When asked how he became so successful in investing, Buffett answered: 'we read hundreds and hundreds of annual reports every year.
Warren Buffett
#45. I knew a lot about what I did when I was 20. I had read a lot, and I aspired to learn everything I could about the subject.
Warren Buffett
#46. When the Federal government buys the mortgages, they're not spending it, they're investing it.
Howard Warren Buffett
#47. I've seen more people fail because of liquor and leverage
leverage being borrowed money. You really don't need leverage in this world much. If you're smart, you're going to make a lot of money without borrowing.
Warren Buffett
#48. As far as you are concerned, the stock market does not exist. Ignore it.
Warren Buffett
#49. Investing requires qualities of temperament way more than it requires qualities of intellect.
Warren Buffett
#50. You shouldn't own common stocks if a 50 per cent decrease in their value in a short period of time would cause you acute distress.
Warren Buffett
#51. An investor needs to do very few things right as long as he or she avoids big mistakes.
Warren Buffett
#53. Buy a cross section of American industry, and if a cross section of American industry doesn't work, certainly trying to pick the little beauties here and there isn't going to work either.
Warren Buffett
#54. Always associate yourself with people who are better than you.
Warren Buffett
#55. A hyperactive stock market is the pickpocket of enterprise.
Warren Buffett
#56. Most people get interested in stocks when everyone else is. The time to get interested is when no one else is. You can't buy what is popular and do well.
Warren Buffett
#57. The three most important words in investing ... Margin of Safety.
Warren Buffett
#58. The best education you can get is investing in yourself, and that doesn't mean college or university.
Warren Buffett
#59. 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.
Warren Buffett
#60. Cash combined with courage in a time of crisis is priceless.
Warren Buffett
#61. When you build a bridge, you insist that it can carry 30,000 pounds, but you only drive 10,000-pound trucks across it. And that same principle works in investing.
Warren Buffett
#62. The greatest Enemies of the Equity investor are Expenses and Emotions.
Warren Buffett
#63. You do not adequately protect yourself by being half awake when other are sleeping.
Warren Buffett
#64. If you can eliminate the government as a 39.6% partner, then you will be much better off.
Warren Buffett
#65. Anything can happen in stock markets and you ought to conduct your affairs so that if the most extraordinary events happen, that you're still around to play the next day.
Warren Buffett
#66. Cash never makes us happy, but it's better to have the money burning a hole in Berkshire's pocket than resting comfortably in someone else's.
Warren Buffett
#67. Never count on making a good sale. Have the purchase price be so attractive that even a mediocre sale gives good results.
Warren Buffett
#68. I don't measure my life by the money I've made. Other people might, but certainly don't.
Warren Buffett
#69. Investing is laying out money now to get more money back in the future.
Warren Buffett
#70. We will only do with your money what we would do with our own.
Warren Buffett
#71. Investing is not as tough as being a top-notch bridge player. All it takes is the ability to see things as they really are.
Warren Buffett
#72. Right at the core, the mainstream has it backwards. Warren Buffett often quips that the first rule of investing is to not lose money, and the second rule is to not forget the first rule. Yet few investors approach the world with such a strict standard of risk avoidance.
Seth Klarman
#73. Accounting consequences do not influence our operating or capital-allocation decisions. When acquisition costs are similar, we much prefer to purchase $2 of earnings that is not reportable by us under standard accounting principles than to purchase $1 of earnings that is reportable.
Warren Buffett
#75. I really like my life. I've arranged my life so that I can do what I want.
Warren Buffett
#76. Our marketable equities tell us by their operating results - not by their daily, or even yearly, price quotations - whether our investments are successful. The market may ignore business success for a while, but eventually will confirm it.
Warren Buffett
#78. All there is to investing is picking good stocks at good times and staying with them as long as they remain good companies.
Warren Buffett
#79. You could be somewhere where the mail was delayed three weeks and do just fine investing.
Warren Buffett
#80. Wild swings in share prices have more to do with the "lemming- like" behaviour of institutional investors than with the aggregate returns of the company they own.
Warren Buffett
#81. It is more important to say "no" to an opportunity, than to say "yes".
Warren Buffett
#82. We have long felt that the only value of stock forecasters is to make fortune-tellers look good.
Warren Buffett
#83. We say we are trying to buy into businesses with excellent economics, run by honest and able people at a decent price. We buy very few securities, so we look at it as "focused" investing.
Warren Buffett
#84. Buy into a company because you want to own it, not because you want the stock to go up.
Warren Buffett
#85. First come the innovators, then come the imitators, then come the idiots.
Warren Buffett
#86. If you aren't thinking about owning a stock for ten years, don't even think about owning it for ten minutes.
Warren Buffett
#87. I get to do what I like to do every single day of the year.
Warren Buffett
#88. Investing in a market where people believe in efficiency is like playing bridge with someone who has been told it doesn't do any good to look at the cards.
Warren Buffett
#89. Traditional wisdom is long on tradition and short on wisdom.
Warren Buffett
#90. We don't have to be smarter than the rest. We have to be more disciplined than the rest.
Warren Buffett
#91. Many stock options in the corporate world have worked in exactly that fashion: they have gained in value simply because management retained earnings, not because it did well with the capital in its hands.
Warren Buffett
#93. Investors should remember that excitement and expenses are their enemies.
Warren Buffett
#94. Read Ben Graham and Phil Fisher read annual reports, but don't do equations with Greek letters in them.
Warren Buffett
#95. With enough insider information and a million dollars, you can go broke in a year.
Warren Buffett
#96. The most important quality for an investor is temperament, not intellect.
Warren Buffett
#97. The active investors will have their returns diminished by a far greater percentage than will their inactive brethren. That means that the passive group - the "know-nothings" - must win.
Warren Buffett
#98. It's us fun being a gorse when the tractor comes along, or the blacksmith when the car comes along.
Warren Buffett
#99. When Berkshire buys common stock, we approach the transaction as if we were buying into a private business.
Warren Buffett
#100. We would do best in a market where everyone acted foolishly.
Warren Buffett
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