Patience and discipline can make you look foolishly out of touch until they make you look prudent and even prescient
The stock market is the story of cycles and of the human behavior that is responsible for overreactions in both directions.
The single greatest edge an investor can have is a long-term orientation.
People should be highly sceptical of anyone's including their own, ability to predict the future, and instead pursue strategies that can survive whatever may occur.
The best protection against risk is knowing what you are doing.
In investing it is never wrong to change your mind. It is only wrong to change your mind and do nothing about it.
You must buy on the way down. There is far more volume on the way down than on the way back up, and far less competition among buyers. It is almost always better to be too early than too late, but you must be prepared for price markdowns on what you buy.
We are big fans of fear, and in investing it is clearly better to be scared than sorry.
The near absence of bargains works as a reverse indicator for us. When we find there is little worth buying, there is probably much worth selling.
We worry top-down, but we invest bottom-up
Graham's wonderful sentence as, an investor needs only two things: cash and courage. Having only one of them is not enough.
I think markets will never be efficient because of human nature.
Investing is the intersection of economics and psychology.
Ultimately, nothing should be more important to investors than the ability to sleep soundly at night.
Successful investors tend to be unemotional, allowing the greed and fear of others to play into their hands. By having confidence in their own analysis and judgement, they respond to market forces not with blind emotion but with calculated reason. Successful investors, for example, demonstrate caution in frothy markets and steadfast conviction in panicky ones. Indeed, the very way an investor views the market and it’s price fluctuations is a key factor in his or her ultimate investment success or failure.
Investing is the intersection of economics and psychology. The analysis is actually the easy part. The economics, the valuation of the business isn't that hard. The psychology - how much do you buy, do you buy it at this price, do you wait for a lower price, what do you do when it looks like the world might end - those things are harder. Knowing whether you stand there, buy more, or whether something has legitimately gone wrong and you need to sell, those are harder things. That you learn with experience, by having the right psychological makeup.
Over the long run, the crowd is always wrong.
Never stop reading. History doesn't repeat, but it does rhyme.
Loss avoidance must be the cornerstone of your investment philosophy.
Value investing is at its core the marriage of a contrarian streak and a calculator.
The overwhelming majority of people are comfortable with consensus, but successful investors tend to have a contrarian bent.
Value investing is simple to understand but difficult to implement. Value investors are not supersophisticated analytical wizards who create and apply intricate computer models to find attractive opportunities or assess underlying value. The hard part is discipline, patience, and judgment. Investors need discipline to avoid the many unattractive pitches that are thrown, patience to wait for the right pitch, and judgment to know when it is time to swing.
Sometimes buying early on the way down looks like being wrong, but it isn't.
Typically, we make money when we buy things. We count the profits later, but we know we have captured them when we buy the bargain.
There's no such thing as a value company. Price is all that matters. At some price, an asset is a buy, at another it's a hold, and at another it's a sell.
