If you don't get it ... you don't get it.

The best buys have been when the number almost tell you not to. Then you feel so strongly about the product. Almost every business we bought is takes 5 or 10 minutes in terms of analysis. If you don't know enough to understand the business instantly, a couple months of analysis won't change that too much.

- Warren Buffett

Of tangents and orbits

The extraordinary thing about the securities market, if you judge it over a long period of years, is the fact that it does not go off on tangents permanently, but it remains in continuous orbit.

- Benjamin Graham

Risk in an investment

The risk of an investment is described by both the probability and the potential amount of loss. The risk of an investment-the probability of an adverse outcome-is partly inherent in its very nature. A dollar spent on biotechnology research is a riskier investment than a dollar used to purchase utility equipment. The former has both a greater probability of loss and a greater percentage of the investment at stake.

- Seth Klarman

Long list of securities

Usually a very long list of securities is not a sign of the brilliant investor, but of one who is unsure of himself.

- Philip Fisher 

IPO

An IPO is like a negotiated transaction - the seller chooses when to come public - and it's unlikely to be a time that's favourable to you.

- Warren Buffett

Market prices are biased views

The generally accepted view is that markets are always right -- that is, market prices tend to discount future developments accurately even when it is unclear what those developments are. I start with the opposite view. I believe the market prices are always wrong in the sense that they present a biased view of the future.

- George Soros

Competitive advantage

An organization's ability to learn, and translate that learning into action rapidly, is the ultimate competitive advantage.


- Jack Welch

Know whether the gamble is mispriced

You're looking for a mispriced gamble. That's what investing is. And you have to know enough to know whether the gamble is mispriced. That's value investing.

- Charles Munger

Pay attention to other factors as well

The risk among any group of investors is that they only pay attention to what they already agree with. That's limiting in our opinion, and dangerous.

- Michael Mauboussin

Practical test

Making an investment decision is like formulating a scientific hypothesis and submitting it to a practical test. The main difference is that the hypothesis that underlies an investment decision is intended to make money and not to establish a universally valid generalization.

- George Soros

Think independently

You can't be a good value investor without being an independent thinker.

- Joel Greenblatt

Forget about 'Option'

You can be highly successful as an investor without having the slightest ability to value an option. What students should be learning is how to value a business. That's what investing is all about.

- Warren Buffett

Securities markets would give a bigger discount than negotiated transactions

Our experience has been that pro-rata portions of truly outstanding businesses sometimes sell in the securities markets at very large discounts from the prices they would command in negotiated transactions involving entire companies.

- Warren Buffett

Economy and the Indexes may not relate very well

During these seventeen years (1964-81), the size of the economy grew fivefold. The sales of the Fortune five hundred companies grew more than fivefold. Yet, during these seventeen years, the stock market went exactly nowhere.

- Warren Buffett

Screen of logic

Even when the underlying motive of purchase (of stocks) is mere speculative greed, human nature desires to conceal this unlovely impulse behind a screen of apparent logic and good sense.

- Benjamin Graham

Excitement: Don't expect

Investing should be more like watching paint dry or watching grass grow. If you want excitement, take $800 and go to Las Vegas.

- Paul Samuelson

Predictions of economists

Economists make predictions because they're asked, not because they know.

- John Kenneth Galbraith

Eager to search

If we become increasingly humble about how little we know, we may be more eager to search.

- John Templeton

Old saying

As the old saying goes, what the wise man does in the beginning, fools do in the end.

- Warren Buffett

Government

A government big enough to give you everything you want is strong enough to take everything you have.

- Thomas Jefferson