stock picking Quotes

Investing is where you find a few great companies and then sit on your ass.

There's lots of stocks out there and all you need is a few of 'em. That's been my philosophy.

All there is to investing is picking good stocks at good times and staying with them as long as they remain good companies.

99% of fund managers demonstrate no evidence of skill whatsoever.

I try to buy shares of unpopular companies when they look like road kill and sell them when they've been polished up a bit.

When people discover they are no good at baseball or hockey, they put away their bats and their skates and they take up amateur golf or stamp collecting or gardening. But when people discover they are no good at picking stocks, they are likely to continue to do it anyway.

Average investors can become experts in their own field and can pick winning stocks as effectively as Wall Street professionals by doing just a little research.

[In picking stocks] You really have to know a lot about business. You have to know a lot about competitive advantage. You have to know a lot about the maintainability of competitive advantage. You have to have a mind that quantifies things in terms of value. And you have to be able to compare those values with other values available in the stock market.

Our mandate is to find the 200 best companies in the world and invest in them, and find the 200 worst companies in the world and go short on them. If the 200 best don't do better than the 200 worst, you should probably be in another business.

The average man doesn't wish to be told that it is a bull or a bear market. What he desires is to be told specifically which particular stock to buy or sell. He wants to get something for nothing. He does not wish to work. He doesn't even wish to have to think.

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

Hedge funds try to produce above-average investment returns using tactics ranging from traditional stock-picking to complex derivative and arbitrage plays. High minimum investments, redemption restrictions and aggressive strategies make them suitable mainly for more sophisticated and well-heeled investors.

After a lifetime of picking stocks, I have to admit that Bogle's arguments in favor of the index fund have me thinking of joining him rather than trying to beat him. Bogle's wisdom and common sense are indispensable... for anyone trying to figure out how to invest in this crazy stock market.

Bargains are the holy grail of the true stockpicker. The fact that 10 to 30 percent of our net worth is lost in a market sell-off is of little consequence. We see the latest correction not as a disaster but as an opportunity to acquire more shares at low prices. This is how great fortunes are made over time.

Twenty years in this business convinces me that any normal person using the customary three percent of the brain can pick stocks just as well, if not better, than the average Wall Street expert.

The stock market really isn't a gamble, as long as you pick good companies that you think will do well, and not just because of the stock price.

What's nice about investing is you don't have to swing at every pitch.

Will customers keep supporting the enormous overhead required to sustain ineffectual, unproductive stock picking across an array of thousands of individual funds devoted to every investing 'style' and economic sector or regional subgroup that some marketing idiot can dream up? Not likely. A brutal shakeout is coming and one of its revelations will be that stock picking is a grossly overrated piece of the puzzle, that cost control is what distinguishes a competitive firm from an uncompetitive one.

Individual investors predictably flock to stocks in companies that are in the news.

The theory of modern education is that you need a general education before you specialize. And I think to some extent, before you're going to be a great stock picker, you need some general education.

I don't think that's changed at all. I think there are a thousand stocks out there that could make you rich, totally independent of what you do for a living.

There is general agreement among researchers that nearly all stock pickers, whether they know it or not-and few of them do-are playing a game of chance.

I have never for a minute felt in was my stock picking abilities. I feel that my stock picking abilities aided- I was able to pick out which are the good stocks in the good market, but I have been blessed with a great market.

Do you really like a particular stock? Put 10% or so of your portfolio on it. Make the idea count … Good [investment] ideas should not be diversified away into meaningless oblivion.

The person that always wins, that's the other thing. The monkey picking stocks always wins.