Charles Schwab Quotes

You don't have to have perfect wisdom to get very rich - just a bit better than average over a long period of time.

There's no evidence that large, diversified food companies win over time.

In business, no one pays you to have a really good year and then 10 bad years.

We look for a horse with one chance in two of winning and which pays you three to one.

Berkshire was built on the eternal verities: basic mathematics, basic horse sense, basic fear, and basic diagnosis of human nature to make predictions regarding human behavior. We stuck to the basics with a certain amount of discipline and it has worked out quite well.

When I bet on horses, I never lose. Why? I bet on all the horses.

It's a lot of fun finding a country that nobody knows about. The only thing better is finding a country everybody's bullish on and shorting it.

Outperforming the market with low volatility on a consistent basis is an impossibility. I outperformed the market for 30-odd years, but not with low volatility.

Professional investment may be likened to those newspaper competitions in which the competitors have to pick out the six prettiest faces from a hundred photographs, the prize being awarded to the competitor whose choice most nearly corresponds to the average preferences of the competitors as a whole.

Back horses or go down to Throgmorton Street and try to take it away from the Rothschilds, and I will applaud you as a shrewd and cautious financier. But to bet at golf is pure gambling.

I learned very early in my investing careers: I better not invest in what I want. I better invest in what's happening in the world. Otherwise I'll be broke - dead broke.

When you go to bat as many times as I do, you're bound to get a good average. That's why I keep my projects diversified.

I did precisely the wrong thing. The cotton showed me a loss and I kept it. The wheat showed me a profit and I sold it out. Of all the speculative blunders there are few greater than trying to average a losing game. Always sell what shows you a loss and keep what shows you a profit.

No horse can go as fast as the money you put on it.

The chief obstacle to success lies in the stubborn fact that if the favorable prospects of a concern are clearly apparent they are almost always reflected already in the current price of the stock. Buying such an issue is like betting on a topheavy favorite in a horse race. The chances may be on your side, but the real odds are against you.

Nobody wants to be passive; indexing is not passive - much more goes into indexing than watching a stock become the next buggy whip.

As for another profession ... I suppose I'd manage a global-macro hedge fund. I love that kind of stuff. Weird, I know, but I find it fascinating.

Building a portfolio around index funds isn’t really settling for the average. It’s just refusing to believe in magic.

Harvard and Yale concentrated with venture capitalists that got the best calls and brainpower. Very few firms made most of the money, and they made it in just a few periods. Everyone else returned between mediocre and lousy. When returns happened, envy rippled through institutional money management. The amount invested in venture capital went up 10 times post-1999. That later money was lost very quickly. It will happen again. I don't know anyone who successfully resists this stuff. It becomes a new orthodoxy.

The plans differ; the planners are all alike.

Like most trends, at the beginning it's driven by fundamentals, at some point speculation takes over. What the wise man does in the beginning, the fool does in the end.

It takes a man a long time to learn all the lessons of all of his mistakes. They say there are two sides to everything. But there is only one side to the stock market; and it is not the bull side or the bear side, but the right side. It took me longer to get that general principle fixed firmly in my mind than it did most of the more technical phases of the game of stock speculation.

Always remember that market quotations are there for convenience, either to be taken advantage of or to be ignored.

We have not known a single person who has consistently or lastingly make money by thus "following the market". We do not hesitate to declare this approach is as fallacious as it is popular.

I never try to predict the market.