Warren Buffett Quotes

If you have to forecast, forecast often.

I have made good judgments in the past. I have made good judgments in the future.

How do Ferrari know what I'm doing next year when I don't know what I'm doing next week?

The key to making a good forecast is not in limiting yourself to quantitative information.

It is far better to foresee even without certainty than not to foresee at all.

I am incredibly bad at predicting the future; I am only smart enough to observe the present and listen to my intuition about tendencies.

Could we have prevented in 100% certainty? I don't think anything is that certain. However, we would have had a very, very good chance for preventing it.

Future forecasting is all about testing strategies - it's like a wind tunnel.

Anybody can do a deal. The tough part is doing the deal at the right time, being strategic.

Forecasting by bureaucrats tends to be used for anxiety relief rather than for adequate policy making.

Precision, directness, and quickness are what human beings are good at. What we have never been good at - in our past, at least - is figuring out the impact, the consequences, of what our skills have allowed us to do.

We spend a lot of time and effort trying to figure out who's going to be a good NFL quarterback, and we do a very bad job of it. We don't really know. And we also spend a lot of time trying to figure out who will be a good teacher, and we're really bad at that too. We don't know if someone is going to be a good teacher when they start teaching. So what should we do in those situations in which predictions are useless?

My track record is pretty good on predictions.

I agree with the realistic Irishman who said he preferred to prophesy after the event.

It is the ability to make predictions about the future that is the crux of intelligence.

It is not enough for [the investor] to know all the factors that can possibly contribute to the determination of a future event. In order to anticipate correctly they must also anticipate correctly the quantity as it were of each factor's contribution and the instant at which its contribution will become effective.

The only useful function of a statistician is to make predictions, and thus to provide a basis for action.

The strategy we've adopted precludes our following standard diversification dogma. Many pundits would therefore say the strategy must be riskier than that employed by more conventional investors. We disagree. We believe that a policy of portfolio concentration may well decrease risk if it raises, as it should, both the intensity with which an investor thinks about a business and the comfort-level he must feel with its economic characteristics before buying into it.

There are no bad business and investment opportunities, but there are bad entrepreneurs and investors.

The sad truth is that opportunity doesn't knock twice. You can put things off until tomorrow but tomorrow may never come. Where will you be a few years down the line. Will it be everything you dreamed of. We seal our fate with the choices we take, but don't give a second thought to the chances we take.

What you really want to do in investments is figure out what's important and knowable. If it's unimportant or unknowable you forget about it.

Knowledge is only one ingredient on arriving at a stock's proper price. The other ingredient, fully as important as information, is sound judgment.

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.

Take the probability of loss times the amount of possible loss from the probability of gain times the amount of possible gain. That is what we're trying to do. It's imperfect, but that's what it's all about.

Might you be missing opportunities because you have been too quick to ask how instead of why?