Risk comes from not knowing what you're doing.
It's far better to buy a wonderful company at a fair price than a fair company at a wonderful price.
Only buy something that you'd be perfectly happy to hold if the market shut down for 10 years.
Someone is sitting in the shade today because someone planted a tree a long time ago.
Rule No.1: Never lose money. Rule No.2: Never forget rule No.1.
In the business world, the rearview mirror is always clearer than the windshield.
Whether we’re talking about socks or stocks, I like buying quality merchandise when it is marked down.
I try to buy stock in businesses that are so wonderful that an idiot can run them. Because sooner or later, one will.
I don't look to jump over 7-foot bars: I look around for 1-foot bars that I can step over.
I never attempt to make money on the stock market. I buy on the assumption that they could close the market the next day and not reopen it for five years.
Look at market fluctuations as your friend rather than your enemy; profit from folly rather than participate in it.
When a management with a reputation for brilliance tackles a business with a reputation for bad economics, it is the reputation of the business that remains intact.
In the short run, the market is a voting machine, but in the long run it is a weighing machine.
Should you find yourself in a chronically leaking boat, energy devoted to changing vessels is likely to be more productive than energy devoted to patching leaks.
When you combine ignorance and leverage, you get some pretty interesting results.
If a business does well, the stock eventually follows.
It's bad enough that you have to take market risk. Only a fool takes on the additional risk of doing yet more damage by failing to diversify properly with his or her nest egg. Avoid the problem-buy a well-run index fund and own the whole market.
Index funds eliminate the risks of individual stocks, market sectors, and manager selection. Only stock market risk remains.
Do not trust financial market risk models. Despite the predilection of some analysts to model the financial markets using sophisticated mathematics, the markets are governed by behavioral science, not physical science.
However, if one has been playing the buy-and-hold game with quality securities, one has been exposed to a substantial amount of market risk because the valuations placed on these securities have implied overly rosy scenarios prone to popular revision in times of more realistic expectation. This is one of those times, but it is my feeling that the revisions have not been severe enough, the expectations not yet realistic enough. Hence, the world's best companies largely remain overpriced in the marketplace.
or simply: