Articles
YEAR-END PEARLS OF WISDOM
For many years, I have been collecting quotes, citations and other bons mots. Of course, Googles and the likes have made this modern variation of plagiarism much easier in recent years, sometimes even dispensing quote addicts like me from reading original books in the text.
On the other hand, there are good reasons besides plagiarism or laziness to use quotes. First, they often express an important idea in a more concise or a more articulate fashion than we might on our own. More importantly, their succinctness serves as a trigger or a seed for thinking about important subjects on our own, without someone else offering you a pre-cooked argument and conclusion.
Here, I offer you selected quotes, principally about investments and money, which are the main subjects of this site.
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You don’t need to be a rocket scientist. Investing is not a game where the guy with the 160 IQ beats the guy with 130 IQ. Warren Buffett
The most important quality for an investor is temperament, not intellect… Unless you can watch your stock holding decline by 50% without becoming panic-stricken, you should not be in the stock market. Warren Buffett
Smart investing doesn’t consist of buying good assets, but of buying assets well. This is a very, very important distinction that very, very few people understand. Howard Marks
The stock market is filled with individuals who know the price of everything, but the value of nothing. Philip Fisher
Price is what you pay. Value is what you get. Charles T. Munger
To suppose that the value of a common stock is determined purely by a corporation’s earnings discounted by the relevant interest rate and adjusted for the marginal tax rate is to forget that people have burned witches, gone to war on a whim, risen to the defense of Joseph Stalin and believed Orson Wells when he told them over the radio that the Martians had landed. Jim Grant
The NYSE and the NASDAQ are markets of information that reflect opinion rather than values of stocks. Peter Bernstein
The dumbest reason in the world to buy a stock is because it’s going up… The investor today does not profit from yesterday’s growth. If past history was all there was to the game, the richest people would be librarians. Warren Buffett
The only value of stock forecasters is to make fortune-tellers look good… A prediction about the direction of the stock market tells you nothing about where stocks are headed, but a whole lot about the person doing the predicting. Warren Buffett
Only when the tide goes out do you discover who’s been swimming naked. Warren Buffett
Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man’s character, give him power. Abraham Lincoln
Friends may come and go, but enemies accumulate. Thomas Jones
HEALTHY, HAPPY and PROSPEROUS NEW YEAR!
François Sicart
January 1, 2018