Charlie Munger Quotes

Pepsi and Coke have to co-exist on the shelf for the long term because if they pull each other down, no one's going to drink carbonated soft drinks anymore.

A second reason why science cannot replace judgement is the behavior of financial markets.

All competitors are fierce competitors; Vodafone is the world's second largest company. We fight it each day. Idea Cellular is big and successful, too. Competition is competition; we are used to it.

I always found the appeal to the market gods a bit odd. Why would the market fix mistakes instead of aggravating them?

I run all the brands like cousins. You want your cousins to do well, but you want to do better. All of our brands want to win, but we certainly want to fight fair and coordinate as much as we can behind the scenes. But to the consumer, we want to offer the broadest, most competitive set of products that we can.

Markets are unforgiving, and sometimes they move for reasons we can't possibly foresee.

'Product life' is measured in months, not years, and as soon as you introduce a 'product,' understand that others in your business are going to reverse engineer it to duplicate the results after they circumnavigate the patents, the trademarks, and the intellectual property.

I believe, in the stock market - that's one of my fields - that most people are irrational. And to be irrational, you can be irrational in so many different ways that, practically, the result is indeterminate.

I'm not a stock expert by any means. Stocks go up; they go down.

Sure, but competition is good for the user.

Commerce is a game of skill which everyone cannot play and few can play well.

In a commodity business, it's very hard to be smarter than your dumbest competitor.

The best mental effort in the game of business is concentrated on the major problem of securing the consumer's dollar before the other fellow gets it.

If you roll dice, you know that the odds are one in six that the dice will come up on a particular side. So you can calculate the risk. But, in the stock market, such computations are bull - you don't even know how many sides the dice have!

The rules when the giants play are the same as when the pygmies enter the market.

Nothing keeps a company honest and efficient like the threat of other companies coming along and taking its business away.

When the functionality of a product or service overshoots what customers can use, it changes the way companies have to compete. When the product isn't yet good enough, the way you compete is by making better products. In order to make better products, the architecture of the product has to be interdependent and proprietary in character.

Nobody really knows what the market is going to do, but it sure looks like we are going to have a lot more volatility.

Anything can happen anytime in markets. And no advisor, economist, or TV commentator-and definitely not Charlie nor I-can tell you when chaos will occur. Market forecasters will fill your ear but will never fill your wallet.

There's no difference in dealing with the music business with the majors than any other competition. The music business is way more cutthroat than any other business.

Life is so uncertain: you never know what could happen. One way to deal with that is to keep your pajamas washed.

When we think about the present, we veer wildly between the belief in chance and the evidence in favour of determinism. When we think about the past, however, it seems obvious that everything happened in the way that it was intended.

There exists no third principle for the organisation of the economics process which can be rationally chosen to achieve any desirable ends, in addition to either a functioning market in which nobody can conclusively determine how well-off particular groups or individuals will be, or a central direction where a group organised for power determines it.

Failure is a big part of a free market's success. People fail to live up to their potential, or to carry out all their good intentions, in all kinds of economic and political systems. Capitalism makes them pay a price for their failures, while socialism, feudalism, fascism and other systems enable personal failures, especially by those at the top, to be ignored.

The sharper the competition, the better it serves its social function to improve economic production.