Warren Buffett Quotes

Fund consultants like to require style boxes such as "long-short," "macro," "international equities." At Berkshire our only style box is "smart."

We need to stop thinking about infrastructure as an economic stimulant and start thinking about it as a strategy. Economic stimulants produce Bridges to Nowhere. Strategic investment in infrastructure produces a foundation for long-term growth.

Portfolio theory, as used by most financial planners, recommends that you diversify with a balance of stocks and bonds and cash that's suitable to your risk tolerance.

In any business opportunity, you'd be looking, probably, primarily at the risk and return. Some business can be very risky with a low return; what you want is the lowest risk with the biggest return.

When I was very young, maybe 12 years, I began to make investments.

You can't invest in natural gas on a daily basis. It's too volatile. But if you think of natural gas as a long-term holding, then you push your profit horizon out. A long-term time horizon would be at least two years.

We have already significant sums of money in our petroleum fund, a fund created by law that includes all the revenues received from the Timor Sea, and invests in conservative, safe, long-term investment portfolios - right now in US Treasury Bonds.

I'm making a case against how money managers are handling customers' money. The objective of the customer is not being met if the fund managers are diversifying their assets into hundreds of businesses. If they do this, they are typically performing close to the indexes. But that's not the way wealth is created.

One has to divide Warren Buffet into different periods. There is a continuously evolving style of Warren Buffett.

I've been investing in the stock market for 27 years and, within that time, have helped investors beat the market nearly four to one.

When commercial banking opened up for the private sector, I set up the retail-banking division for ICICI and grew it substantially. I then ran the international side of the ICICI Bank for a few years.

In some industries, we refer to risk taking as 'research and development.' At financial institutions, we often take risk by investing in securities.

The banking industry has traditionally been characterized by physical branches, privileged access to financial data, and distinct expertise in analyzing such data.

It is a tenet of my investment style that, on the subject of common stock investment, maximizing the upside means first and foremost minimizing the downside. The deleterious effect of permanent capital loss on portfolio returns cannot be overstated.

I always say investors invest in lines, not dots.

Let's stop bankrupting the country and start investing in our future.

we have complaints that institutional dominance of the stock market has put 'the small investor at a disadvantage because he can't compete with the trust companies' huge resources, etc. The facts are quite the opposite. It may be that the institutions are better equipped than the individual to speculate in the market.But I am convinced that an individual investor with sound principles, and soundly advised, can do distinctly better over the long pull than large institutions.

Investing is the greatest business in the world because you never have to swing. You stand at the plate; the pitcher throws you General Motors at 47! U.S. Steel at 39! And nobody calls a strike on you. There's no penalty except opportunity. All day you wait for the pitch you like; then, when the fielders are asleep, you step up and hit it.

And many of the people who buy or found banks have had no experience in banking at all. If they can learn it, so can we.

Investment based on genuine long-term expectations is so difficult today as to be scarcely practicable.

No one in his right mind would walk into the cockpit of an airplane and try to fly it, or into an operating theater and open a belly. And yet they think nothing of managing their retirement assets. I've done all three, and I'm here to tell you that managing money is, in its most critical elements even more demanding than the first two.

Indexing is a successful approach to investing not because it's simple, but because it has performed so much better than the average active manager (the opposite of indexing), and the simplicity is just an added bonus.

The [stock] market,like the Lord, helps those who help themselves. But, unlike the Lord, the market does not forgive those who know not what they do.

The truth is that I've got all my net worth safely in Berkshire and I will never sell a share so there is no one more concerned about what happens after my death than I am.

Wrigley is a great business, but that doesn't solve the problem. Buying great businesses at advantageous prices is very tough.