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15 Great Investor & Trader Quotes

  
  Education
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Warren Buffett (Net Worth $39 Billion) – “‘Price is what you pay; value is what you get.’ Whether we’re talking about socks or stocks, I like buying quality merchandise when it is marked down.”

George Soros (Net Worth $22 Billion) – ”I’m only rich because I know when I’m wrong…I basically have survived by recognizing my mistakes.”

David Rubenstein (Net Worth $2.8 Billion) – “Persist – don’t take no for an answer. If you’re happy to sit at your desk and not take any risk, you’ll be sitting at your desk for the next 20 years.”

Ray Dalio (Net Worth $6.5 Billion) – “More than anything else, what differentiates people who live up to their potential from those who don’t is a willingness to look at themselves and others objectively.”

Eddie Lampert (Net Worth $3 Billion) – “This idea of anticipation is key to investing and to business generally. You can’t wait for an opportunity to become obvious. You have to think, “Here’s what other people and companies have done under certain circumstances. Now, under these new circumstances, how is this management likely to behave?”

T. Boone Pickens (Net Worth $1.4 Billion) – “The older I get, the more I see a straight path where I want to go. If you’re going to hunt elephants, don’t get off the trail for a rabbit.”

Charlie Munger (Net Worth $1 Billion) – “If you took our top fifteen decisions out, we’d have a pretty average record. It wasn’t hyperactivity, but a hell of a lot of patience. You stuck to your principles and when opportunities came along, you pounced on them with vigor.”

David Tepper (Net Worth $5 Billion) – “This company looks cheap, that company looks cheap, but the overall economy could completely screw it up. The key is to wait. Sometimes the hardest thing to do is to do nothing.”

Benjamin Graham  – “The individual investor should act consistently as an investor and not as a speculator. This means that he should be able to justify every purchase he makes and each price he pays by impersonal, objective reasoning that satisfies him that he is getting more than his money’s worth for his purchase.”

Louis Bacon (Net Worth $1.4 Billion) – “As a speculator you must embrace disorder and chaos.”

Paul Tudor Jones (Net Worth $3.2 Billion) – “Were you want to be is always in control, never wishing, always trading, and always, first and foremost protecting your butt. After a while size means nothing. It gets back to whether you’re making 100% rate of return on $10,000 or $100 million dollars. It doesn’t make any difference.”

Bruce Kovner (Net Worth $4.3 Billion) – ” My experience with novice traders is that they trade three to five times too big. They are taking 5 to 10 percent risks on a trade when they should be taking 1 to 2 percent risks. The emotional burden of trading is substantial; on any given day, I could lose millions of dollars. If you personalize these losses, you can’t trade.”

Rene Rivkin (Net Worth $346 Million) – “When buying shares, ask yourself, would you buy the whole company?”

Peter Lynch (Net Worth $352 Million) – “I think you have to learn that there’s a company behind every stock, and that there’s only one real reason why stocks go up. Companies go from doing poorly to doing well or small companies grow to large companies.”

John Templeton (Net Worth $20 Billion)– “The time of maximum pessimism is the best time to buy and the time of maximum optimism is the best time to sell.”

John (Jack) Bogle (Net Worth $4 Billion) – “If you have trouble imagining a 20% loss in the stock market, you shouldn’t be in stocks.”

Trading Against the Elephant

  
  Education
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Once upon a time, there were six blind men. The blind men wished toknow what an elephant looked like. They took a trip to the forest and with the help of their guide found a tame elephant. The first blind man walked into the broadside of the elephant and bumped his head. He declared that the elephant was like a wall. The second one grabbed the elephant’s tusk and said it felt like a spear. The next blind man felt the trunk of the elephant and was sure that elephants were similar to snakes. The fourth blind man hugged the elephant’s leg and declared the elephant was like a tree. The next one caught the ear and said this is definitely like a fan. The last blind man felt the tail and said this sure feels like a rope. Thus the six blind men all perceived one aspect of the elephant and were each right in their own way, but none of them knew what the whole elephant really looked like.

Oftentimes, the market poses itself as the elephant. There are people who say that predicting the market is like predicting the weather, because you can do well in the short term, but where the market will be in the long run is anybody’s guess. (more…)

Lessons from Lobagola

  
  Education
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[A LoBagola, as described in The Education of A Speculator

by Dr. Niederhoffer, is a phenomenon whereby a market makes an
historically large run in one direction, usually up, and then at some
unpredictable point begins an equally extreme run back to where it
started.]

1. The pace of the elephants on the way down set the underlying conditions for the reversal. The expectation studies must include the number of failed reversal attempts, as well as the usual measures.

2. In actual migrations, elephants selectively eat trees/plants without killing them, the plants re-grow and the elephants eat them on the reversal (coppicing effect). Hence, elephants are able to use the same migration route because they know that the resources in these areas will be available to them. In markets, the footprint of the move can be observed in the patterns of time and volume and untouched bids and offers.

3. The most difficult part of trading lobagolas is: “nobody knows when they come back”. Qualitative observations about the nature of the migration might help. There are two main causes for elephant migration: resources and human intervention, the latter also is known to be able to change the path of the elephants. Some classification studies (not retrospectively) in market moves is appropriate. (more…)

15 Great Investor Quotes

  
  Education
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Insightful Investment Quotes

warren-buffett quoteWarren Buffett (Net Worth $39 Billion) – “‘Price is what you pay; value is what you get.’ Whether we’re talking about socks or stocks, I like buying quality merchandise when it is marked down.”
george-soros quoteGeorge Soros (Net Worth $22 Billion) – ”I’m only rich because I know when I’m wrong…I basically have survived by recognizing my mistakes.”
david-rubenstein-quoteDavid Rubenstein (Net Worth $2.8 Billion) – “Persist – don’t take no for an answer. If you’re happy to sit at your desk and not take any risk, you’ll be sitting at your desk for the next 20 years.”
ray-dalio quoteRay Dalio (Net Worth $6.5 Billion) – “More than anything else, what differentiates people who live up to their potential from those who don’t is a willingness to look at themselves and others objectively.” (more…)

10 quotes from Warren Buffett’s letter to shareholders

  
  Education
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Warren Buffett is hunting for elephants and a bear.

You can look through the whole thing here, including as easily digested discussions of accounting as you’re ever likely to see.

But for those with limited time, here’s a look at 10 of the pithier comments.

1. On the search for new investment opportunities for Berkshire’s huge cash reserves after the acquisition of half of Heinz  HNZ -0.08% last month:

“Charlie and I have again donned our safari outfits and resumed our search for elephants.”

2. On strong performance at the GEICO insurance unit:

“The credit for GEICO’s extraordinary performance goes to Tony Nicely and his 27,000 associates. And to that cast, we should add our Gecko. Neither rain nor storm nor gloom of night can stop him; the little lizard just soldiers on, telling Americans how they can save big money by going to GEICO.com. When I count my blessings, I count GEICO twice.”

3. On company headcount:

“Berkshire’s yearend employment totaled a record 288,462, up 17,604 from last year. Our headquarters crew, however, remained unchanged at 24. No sense going crazy.” (more…)

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