Warren Buffett Quotes

You'd rather own gold; never own the miner.

I caught hold of the great bull market in soybeans in 1977. I had no idea what I was doing, incidentally.

Speculation, in its broadest sense, is not an evil in itself, but the contrary, and relieves public distress far oftener than it creates it.

People always come up to me and ask what the next 'big short' will be. The truth is I simply do not have an answer, and do not want to have an answer, to this question.

The one stock in my portfolio which I say hasn't worked yet but has the potential for a big home run is General Motors.

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

Confusing speculation with investment is always a mistake.

More money is lost anticipating the changes in the overall stock market than any other way of investing.

I believe the only things that really matter in investing are the bubbles and the busts

Thousands of people have tried, and the evidence is clear: The more you trade, the less you keep.

Investors making purchases in an overheated market need to recognize that it may often take an extended period for the value of even an outstanding company to catch up with the price they paid.

The distinction between investment and speculation in common stocks has always been a useful one and its disappearance is cause for concern.

I knew a guy who had $5 million and owned his house free and clear. But he wanted to make a bit more money to support his spending, so at the peak of the internet bubble he was selling puts on internet stocks. He lost all of his money and his house and now works in a restaurant. It's not a smart thing for the country to legalize gambling [in the stock market] and make it very accessible.

We will prosper or suffer in controlled investments in relation to the operating performances of our businesses - we will not attempt to profit by playing various games in the securities markets.

Gold is a way of going long on fear, and it has been a pretty good way of going long on fear from time to time. But you really have to hope people become more afraid in a year or two years than they are now. And if they become more afraid you make money, if they become less afraid you lose money, but the gold itself doesn’t produce anything.

Remember this: When you are doing nothing, those speculators who feel they must trade day in and day out, are laying the foundation for your next venture. You will reap benefits from their mistakes.

You must never delude yourself into thinking that you're investing when you're speculating.

Speculator: One who bought stocks that went down.

The mutual fund industry has been built, in a sense, on witchcraft.

People who invest make money for themselves; people who speculate make money for their brokers. And that, in turn, is why Wall Street perennially downplays the durable virtues of investing and hypes the gaudy appeal of speculation.

Speculation is a hard and trying business, and a speculator must be on the job all the time or he'll soon have no job to be on.

As in roulette, same is true of the stock trader, who will find that the expense of trading weights the dice heavily against him.

Of course if you happen to time the market really well, you can make more money with some of these smaller companies, but for someone with no exposure I wouldn't want to take the risk that they timed it wrong.

The biggest mistake investors make is to believe that what happened in the recent past is likely to persist. They assume that something that was a good investment in the recent past is still a good investment. Typically, high past returns simply imply that an asset has become more expensive and is a poorer, not better, investment.

The chief losses to investors come from the purchase of low-quality securities at times of favorable business conditions.