Guy Spier Quotes

I love reading Warren Buffett's letters, and I love contrasting his words with his actions. He's a very wise guy.

The person who I admire most in business is Warren Buffett. He is a long-term investor and has brilliant ideas, and he sticks to them.

We absolutely take no decisions based on the share price, not for LVMH.

All of us would be better investors if we just made fewer decisions.

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

I never buy anything unless I can fill out on a piece of paper my reasons. I may be wrong, but I would know the answer to that ...I'm paying $32 billion today for the Coca Cola Company because... If you can't answer that question, you shouldn't buy it. If you can answer that question, and you do it a few times, you'll make a lot of money.

At age 19, I read a book [The Intelligent Investor] and what I'm doing today, at age 76, is running things through the same thought process I learned from the book I read at 19.

My time at Shell was a most valuable experience because it taught me to look at the world in a long-term way. Shell takes a 20-year view on events and plans for different scenarios. It makes you see the world as a kind of large matrix.

When Warren Buffett invests in a company, he is conferring upon that company something very unique: his credibility.

Business reporting is not dealing with objects, it is dealing with relationships between objects.

When I first got into business, I made a lot of bad decisions.

The very first stock I bought right out of college was Berkshire Hathaway.

We are led by lawyers who do not understand either technology or balance sheets.

Prudence is what makes someone a great commodities trader - the capacity to face reality squarely in the eye without allowing emotion or ego to get in the way. It's what is needed by every quarterback or battlefield general.

When you're talking about capital and financial things, which I certainly pay a lot of attention to, I base those decisions on one question that I typically ask myself, which is 'Does it help us to build a better company?'

So, what genetic disposition do you need to be a CFO? Essentially, you need to be miserable, you need to be the sort of person who takes drinks away from people at the end of a party.

When buying shares, ask yourself, would you buy the whole company?

The only way one should buy stocks is if you understand the underlying business. You stay within the circle of competence. You buy businesses you understand.

The single biggest advantage a value investor has is not IQ. It's patience and waiting. Waiting for the right pitch, and waiting for many years for the right pitch.

I'm going to reveal the grand secret to getting rich by investing. It's a simple formula that has worked for Warren Buffett, Carl Icahn and all the greatest investment gurus over the years. Ready? Buy low, sell high.

Market timing doesn't work. If all the bubbles and all this mispricing really exist, how come so few people see it before it turns out that way?

I think, you know, a fellow CEO said to me that the interesting thing about being CEO that's really striking is that you have very few decisions that you need to make, and you need to make them absolutely perfectly.

The market is often stupid, but you can't focus on that. Focus on the underlying value of dividends and earnings.

As CEO of Aetna, I was a buyer of portfolio companies rather than a participant in the value creation process. From the end of the assembly line, what happened in manufacturing wasn't visible to me.

We like to say we pray in the church of Graham, Dodd, Buffett, and Munger.