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
Warren Buffett quotes about
What an investor needs is the ability to correctly evaluate selected businesses. Note that word “selected”: You don't have to be an expert on every company, or even many. You only have to be able to evaluate companies within your circle of competence. The size of that circle is not very important; knowing its boundaries, however, is vital.
Knowing the edge of your competency is important. If you think you know more than you do, you will get in trouble.
If knowing history made you rich, librarians would be billionaires.
Risk comes from not knowing what you are doing so wide diversification is only required when investors are ignorant. You only have to do a very few things in your life so long as you don't do too many things wrong.
Knowing what to leave out is just as important as knowing what to focus on.
The best thing I did was to choose the right heroes.
You have to learn to understand your partner, to be tolerant, sympathetic, encouraging. Those are skills that are not bad to have in life.
Berkshire's board has fully discussed each of the three CEO candidates and has unanimously agreed on the person who should succeed me if a replacement were needed today. The directors know now - and will always know in the future - exactly what they will do when the need arises.
Two rules:1. Preserve the principal2. When in doubt see Rule #1
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.
Warren, isn't it fair to say that if we did have an opinion, we wouldn't tell him?
I bought a company in the mid-'90s called Dexter Shoe and paid $400 million for it. And it went to zero. And I gave about $400 million worth of Berkshire stock, which is probably now worth $400 billion. But I've made lots of dumb decisions. That's part of the game.
The 3 percent overall federal tax rate I would pay -- if a Berkshire dividend were to be tax free -- seems a bit light.
I think it is a marvelous way to keep directors' interests and shareholders interests as closely aligned as possible, with both an upside and a downside component. Too often, people talk about interests being aligned when the directors get the upside and shareholders get the downside.