Warren Buffett
Warren Buffett
Warren Edward Buffett is an American business magnate, investor and philanthropist. He is considered by some to be one of the most successful investors in the world. Buffett is the chairman, CEO and largest shareholder of Berkshire Hathaway, and is consistently ranked among the world's wealthiest people. He was ranked as the world's wealthiest person in 2008 and as the third wealthiest in 2015. In 2012 Time named Buffett one of the world's most influential people...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionEntrepreneur
Date of Birth30 August 1930
CityOmaha, NE
CountryUnited States of America
When a management team with a reputation for brilliance tackles a business with a reputation for bad economics, it is the reputation of the business that remains intact.
Rule No.1: Never lose money. Rule No.2: Never forget rule No.1.
You need an outstanding manager - you can define that in many ways... but you are looking for the best player out there. We are looking for the best player in this kind of business in the world.
I always say that in investing you want to buy stock in a company that has a business that's so good that an idiot can run it, because sooner or later one will. We have a country like that.
What's nice about investing is you don't have to swing at every pitch.
The strategy we've adopted precludes our following standard diversification dogma. Many pundits would therefore say the strategy must be riskier than that employed by more conventional investors. We disagree. We believe that a policy of portfolio concentration may well decrease risk if it raises, as it should, both the intensity with which an investor thinks about a business and the comfort-level he must feel with its economic characteristics before buying into it.
Writing checks to the IRS that include strings of zeros does not bother me ... Overall, we feel extraordinarily lucky to have been dealt a hand in life that enables us to write large checks to the government rather than one requiring the government to regularly write checks to us-say, because we are disabled or unemployed.
The range of derivatives contracts is limited only by the imagination of man (or sometimes, so it seems, madmen). Say you want to write a contract speculating on the number of twins to be born in Nebraska in 2020. No problem-at a price, you will easily find an obliging counterparty.
In our view, derivatives are financial weapons of mass destruction carrying dangers that, while latent, are potentially lethal.
I won't close down a business of subnormal profitability merely to add a fraction of a point to our corporate returns. I also feel it inappropriate for even an exceptionally profitable company to fund an operation once it appears to have unending losses in prospect. Adam Smith would disagree with my first proposition and Karl Marx would disagree with my second; the middle ground is the only position that leaves me comfortable.
Americans are in a cycle of fear which leads to people not wanting to spend and not wanting to make investments, and that leads to more fear. We'll break out of it. It takes time.
Earnings can be pliable as putty when a charlatan heads the company reporting them.
If you want your business to survive for 100 years, you've got to make it through every single day for 100 years. It's not enough to do it 99.9% of the time.
I like to go for cinches. I like to shoot fish in a barrel. But I like to do it after the water has run out.