Beny Steinmetz Quotes

We have large resources of uranium that we are exploring, and we are extremely encouraged.

With enough insider information and a million dollars, you can go broke in a year.

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.

Most people get interested in stocks when everyone else is. The time to get interested is when no one else is. You can't buy what is popular and do well.

If you understood a business perfectly and the future of the business, you would need very little in the way of a margin of safety. So, the more vulnerable the business is, assuming you still want to invest in it, the larger margin of safety you'd need. If you're driving a truck across a bridge that says it holds 10,000 pounds and you've got a 9,800 pound vehicle, if the bridge is 6 inches above the crevice it covers, you may feel okay, but if it's over the Grand Canyon, you may feel you want a little larger margin of safety.

As a manager, you always have a gun to your head. It's a question of whether there is a bullet in the barrel.

You can lose leverage, and it's the only way a smart guy can go broke.

Ask yourself: Am I an investor, or am I a speculator? An investor is a person who owns business and holds it forever and enjoys the returns that U.S. businesses, and to some extent global businesses, have earned since the beginning of time. Speculation is betting on price. Speculation has no place in the portfolio or the kit of the typical investor.

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.

Most companies don't die because they are wrong; they die because they don't commit themselves. They fritter away their momentum and their valuable resources while attempting to make a decision. The greatest danger is standing still.

The speculator is not an investor.

Don't speculate unless you can make it a full time job.

So many businesses get worried about looking like they might make a mistake, they become afraid to take any risk. Companies are set up so that people judge each other on failure. I am not going to get fired if we have a bad year. Or a bad five years. I don’t have to worry about making things look good if they’re not. I can actually set up the company to create value.

I have been in relatively high-risk businesses all of my adult life. Few of the others, however, had the possibility of direct gains in knowledge which this one had. I have confidence in the equipment, the planning, the training. I suspect that on a risk-gain ratio, this project would compare very, very favorably with those to which I've been accustomed on the past 20 years.

For those properly prepared, the bear market is not only a calamity but an opportunity.

It is a mistake to think that one limits one’s risk by spreading too much between enterprises about which one knows little and has no reason for special confidence.

No decision in business provides greater potential for the creation of wealth (or its destruction, come to think of it) than the choice of which innovation to back.

Businesses always have opportunities to improve service, product lines, manufacturing techniques, and the like, and obviously these opportunities should be seized. But a business that constantly encounters major change also encounters many chances for major error

In engineering, people have a big margin of safety. But in the financial world, people don't give a damn about safety. They let it balloon and balloon and balloon. It's aided by false accounting.

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.

If you're going to fail, you'd rather fail early than fail late in general.

The market can move for irrational reasons, and you have to be prepared for that, ... you need to make big bets when the odds are in your favor -- not big enough to ruin you, but big enough to make a difference.

I'm in the business where I can't ever say there's no risk associated with someone.

You can't make money with a consensus accurate prediction.

It's dangerous to short stocks.