Warren Buffett Quotes

Investigate carefully before you invest. Spend as much time researching the investment as you spend earning the money.

Spend at least as much time researching a stock as you would choosing a refrigerator.

Investment must be rational; if you can't understand it, don't do it.

The market always, in theory at least, looks ahead. And it's always trying to take in every bit of information that it can as quickly as it can. You don't really care so much if the company made a dollar last year; you want to know what it's going to make this year.

I have a knack - and still do - where I can look at a guy and tell you if he's going to draw you money or not. That's very difficult to do. I haven't met too many people who can do that.

If you understood a business perfectly and the future of the business, you would need very little in the way of a margin of safety. So, the more vulnerable the business is, assuming you still want to invest in it, the larger margin of safety you'd need. If you're driving a truck across a bridge that says it holds 10,000 pounds and you've got a 9,800 pound vehicle, if the bridge is 6 inches above the crevice it covers, you may feel okay, but if it's over the Grand Canyon, you may feel you want a little larger margin of safety.

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

It's one of the most important things at the end of the day, being able to say no to an investment.

The only thing I would say is, I think there's a lot of future value in Blackberry, but without experienced people who have run this type of business, and without a strategic plan, it would be really challenging.

When you're an investor, you can look at the quantitative and qualitative elements of an investment, but there's a third aspect: What you feel in your gut.

Good analysis is very useful when you want to convert a political decision into an investment. It can also go the other way and drive policy.

We reviewed our process at Greylock and discovered that the best investments are non-obvious enough that they result in a mixed vote by our partnership.

The best early-stage venture capital investments appear obvious in retrospect; however, very few of them are actually obvious when you make them.

The essence of a good investment manager is one who studies a given business and extrapolates the future cash flows that the business is likely to generate over the next several years. Based on the cash flow and asset assessment, they can then arrive at their expected rate of return if they bought a fraction of that business at a given price.

When selecting businesses, I first have to be enticed by the product or the industry they are in. Then I look for passion. If a company has these two qualifiers, I go for it.

I'm a very commonsense guy - I just look at the viability of the idea, if I feel the team has the ability to execute the idea. I also look at the investment syndicate, the size of the market, and then a lot of gut married on top of it.

When you see a 'Shark fight' erupt, we aggressively want to understand what we are committing our money toward.

It's not given to human beings to have such talent that they can just know everything about everything all the time. But it is given to human beings who work hard at it - who look and sift the world for a mispriced bet - that they can occasionally find one. And the wise ones bet heavily when the world offers them that opportunity. They bet big when they have the odds. And the rest of the time they don't. It's just that simple.

I put heavy weight on certainty. It's not risky to buy securities at a fraction of what they're worth.

Before you invest, you must ensure that you have realistically assessed your probability of being right and how you will react to the consequences of being wrong.

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.

We urgently need an end to these false assurances, to the sugar coating of unpalatable facts. It is the public that is being asked to assume the risks that the insect controllers calculate. The public must decide whether it wishes to continue on the present road, and it can do so only when in full possession of the facts.

We define a bargain issue as one which, on the basis of facts established by analysis, appears to be worth considerably more that it is selling for.

If the value of a company doesn't just scream out at you, it's too close.

Never invest in a business you don't understand.