Avoid the herd

Mimicking the herd invites regression to the mean.

- Charles Munger

You don't succeed by doing this

If I have noticed anything over these sixty years on Wall Street, it is that people do not succeed in forecasting what's going to happen to the stock market.

- Benjamin Graham

Don't pick a stock

You shouldn't just pick a stock - you should do your homework.

- Peter Lynch

Patience needed for this to work

Traditional value investing strategies have worked for years and everyone's known about them. They continue to work because it's hard for people to do, for two main reasons. First, the companies that show up on the screens can be scary and not doing so well, so people find them difficult to buy. Second, there can be one-, two- or three-year periods when a strategy like this doesn't work. Most people aren't capable of sticking it out through that.

- Joel Greenblatt

Focus Investing

Our investment style has been given a name - focus investing - which implies ten holdings, not one hundred or four hundred. The idea that it is hard to find good investments, so concentrate in a few, seems to me to be an obvious idea. But 98% of the investment world does not think this way. It's been good for us.

- Charles Munger

Few winners would do

All you need for a lifetime of successful investing is a few big winners, and the pluses from those will overwhelm the minuses from the stocks that don't work out.

- Peter Lynch

Business vs Manager

However, averaged out, betting on the quality of a business is better than betting on the quality of management. In other words, if you have to choose one, bet on the business momentum, not the brilliance of the manager.

- Charles Munger

Times to look for

The time of maximum pessimism is the best time to buy and the time of maximum optimism is the best time to sell.

- Sir John Templeton

Shameful

There is no shame in losing money on a stock. Everybody does it. What is shameful is to hold on to a stock or worse to buy more of it when the fundamentals are deteriorating.

- Peter Lynch