investment approach Quotes

The Berkshire-style investors tend to be less diversified than other people. The academics have done a terrible disservice to intelligent investors by glorifying the idea of diversification. Because I just think the whole concept is literally almost insane. It emphasizes feeling good about not having your investment results depart very much from average investment results. But why would you get on the bandwagon like that if somebody didn't make you with a whip and a gun?

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

There is only one side of the market and it is not the bull side or the bear side, but the right side.

The whole concept of dividing it up into 'value' and 'growth' strikes me as twaddle. It's convenient for a bunch of pension fund consultants to get fees prattling about and a way for one advisor to distinguish himself from another. But, to me, all intelligent investing is value investing.

Stocks are at an all-time high today. I don't have any money in the stock market. I don't have the stomach for the ups and downs. So about 20 years ago I put all of my money and liquid assets into videotape rewind machines.

I always like it when someone attractive to me agrees with me, so I have fond memories of Phil Fisher. The idea that it was hard to find good investments, so concentrate in a few, seems to me to be an obviously good idea. But 98% of the investment world doesn't think this way.

When we look at our business, we are not that concerned about short term valuations.

Why would you want to invest with a guy whose thought process says, "If a second layer of fees is good, then let's add a third layer.

Everything I do in investment is just very different.

Always start at the end before you begin. Professional investors always have an exit strategy before they invest. Knowing your exit strategy is an important investment fundamental.

[With] closet indexing....you're paying a manager a fortune and he has 85% of his assets invested parallel to the indexes. If you have such a system, you're being played for a sucker.

I never buy a house thinking that I'm going to sell it.

In order to be a really good investor, you need to be a little bit of a philosopher as well.

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

Wise investors won't try to outsmart the market.

The pure administration of Graham-and-Doddery really needs a long-term lock-up like Warren Buffett has, or it will have occasional quite dreadful client problems.

There is something in people; you might even call it a little bit of a gambling instinct… I tell people investing should be dull. It shouldn't be exciting. Investing should be more like watching paint dry or watching grass grow. If you want excitement, take $800 and go to Las Vegas.

The investor has a right to expect good results to flow from a consistent and courageous application of the principle of buying after the market has declined substantially and selling after it has had a spectacular rise. But he cannot expect to reduce this principle to a simple and foolproof formula, with profits guaranteed and no anxious periods.

My method for picking stocks has never changed. When businesses go from crappy to semicrappy, there's money to be made.

Growth and value investing are joined at the hip.

I think one should definitely invest, not all the money in one go but keep some and invest the rest as and when required.

It is unquestionably true that the investment companies have their money more conventionally invested than we do. To many people conventionality is indistinguishable from conservatism. In my view, this represents erroneous thinking. Neither a conventional nor an unconventional approach, per se, is conservative.

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.

Short-term market and economic prognostication is largely a fool’s errand, we invest according to a strategy that makes the need to rely on short-term market or economic assessments largely irrelevant.

Our success has come from the lack of oversight we've provided, and our success will continue to be from a lack of oversight. But if you're going to provide minimal oversight, you have to buy carefully. It's a different model from GE's. GE's works - it's just very different from ours.