Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I know of no long-time practitioner who regrets adhering to a value philosophy; few investors who embrace the fundamental principles ever abandon this investment approach for another
The inability to hold cash and the pressure to be fully invested at all times meant that when the plug was pulled out of the tub, all boats dropped as the water rushed down the drain.
My experience is that short sellers do far better analysis than long buyers because they have to. The market is biased upward over time-as the saying goes, stocks are for the long run.
While knowing how to value businesses is essential for investment success, the first and perhaps most important step in the investment process is knowing where to look for opportunities
While it might seem that anyone can be a value investor, the essential characteristics of this type of investor-patience, discipline, and risk aversion-may well be genetically determined.
As Buffett has often observed, value investing is not a concept that can be learned and gradually applied over time. It is either absorbed and adopted at once, or it is never truly learned.
There is an old saying, "How did you go bankrupt?" And the answer is, "Gradually, and then suddenly." The impending fiscal crisis in the United States will make its appearance in the same way.
In a rising market, everyone makes money and a value philosophy is unnecessary. But because there is no certain way to predict what the market will do, one must follow a value philosophy at all times.
Because investors are not usually penalized for adhering to conventional practices, doing so is the less professionally risky strategy, even though it virtually guarantees against superior performance.
Investors need to pick their poison: Either make more money when times are good and have a really ugly year every so often, or protect on the downside and don't be at the party so long when things are good.
Value investors have to be patient and disciplined, but what I really think is you need not to be greedy. If you're greedy and you leverage, you blow up. Almost every financial blow up is because of leverage.
It turns out that value investing is something that is in your blood. There are people who just don't have the patience and discipline to do it, and there are people who do. So it leads me to think it's genetic.
Targeting investment returns leads investors to focus on potential upside rather on downside risk ... rather than targeting a desired rate of return, even an eminently reasonable one, investors should target risk.
I think Buffett is a better investor than me because he has a better eye toward what makes a great business. And when I find a great business I'm happy to buy it and hold it. Most businesses don't look so great to me.
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.
A margin of safety is achieved when securities are purchased at prices sufficiently below underlying value to allow for human error, bad luck, or extreme volatility in a complex, unpredictable and rapidly changing world.
Value investing is the discipline of buying shares at a significant discount from their current underlying values and holding them until more of their value is realised. The element of a bargain is the key to the process.
To a value investor, investments come in three varieties: undervalued at one price, fairly valued at another price, and overvalued at still some higher price. The goal is to buy the first, avoid the second, and sell the third.
When managers are afraid of redemptions, they get liquid. We all saw how many managers went from leveraged long in 2007 to huge net cash in 2008, when the right thing to do in terms of value would have been to do the opposite.
It is always easiest to run with the herd; at times, it can take a deep reservoir of courage and conviction to stand apart from it. Yet distancing yourself from the crowd is an essential component of long-term investment success.
It sounds kind of crazy, but in times of turmoil in the market, I've felt a sort of serenity in knowing that I've checked and re-checked my work, one plus one still equals two regardless of where a stock trades right after I buy it.
A commodity doesn't have the same characteristics as a security, characteristics that allow for analysis. Other than a recent sale or appreciation due to inflation, analyzing the current or future worth of a commodity is nearly impossible.
Warren Buffett once wrote that value investing is like an inoculation--it either takes or it doesn't--and when you explain to somebody what it is and how it works and why it works and show them the returns, either they get it or they don't.
Markets need not be in sync with one another. Simultaneously, the bond market can be priced for sustained tough times, the equity market for a strong recovery, and gold for high inflation. Such an apparent disconnect is indefinitely sustainable.
Investors should always keep in mind that the most important metric is not the returns achieved but the returns weighed against the risks incurred. Ultimately, nothing should be more important to investors than the ability to sleep soundly at night.
Many LBOs are man-made disasters. When the price paid is excessive, the equity portion of an LBO is really an out-of-the-money call option. Many fiduciaries placed large amounts of the capital under their stewardship into such options in 2006 and 2007.
When you buy bargains and they become better bargains, it is easy to start to question yourself, which can impair your judgement. Real or imagined concerns about client redemptions, employee defections can greatly influence behavior away from rational.
At the worst possible moment, when your fund is down because cheap things have gotten cheaper, you need to have capital, to have clients who will actually love the phone call and-most of the time, if not all the time-add, rather than subtract, capital.
You must buy on the way down. There is far more volume on the way down than on the way back up, and far less competition among buyers. It is almost always better to be too early than too late, but you must be prepared for price markdowns on what you buy.
Almost no one will accept responsibility for his or her role in precipitating a crisis: not leveraged speculators, not willfully blind leaders of financial institutions, and certainly not regulators, government officials, ratings agencies or politicians.
At equal returns, public investments are generally superior to private investments not only because they are more liquid but also because amidst distress, public markets are more likely than private ones to offer attractive opportunities to average down.
As Graham, Dodd and Buffett have all said, you should always remember that you don't have to swing at every pitch. You can wait for opportunities that fit your criteria and if you don't find them, patiently wait. Deciding not to panic is still a decision.
We continue to adhere to a common-sense view of risk - how much we can lose and the probability of losing it. While this perspective may seem over simplisticor even hopelessly outdated, we believe it provides a vital clarity about the true risks in investing.
At Baupost, we constantly ask: 'What should we work on today?' We keep calling and talking. We keep gathering information. You never have perfect information. So you work, work and work. Sometimes we thumb through ValuLine. How you fill your inbox is very important.
The strategy of buying what's in favor is a fool's errand, ensuring long-term underperformance. Only by standing against the prevailing winds - selectively, but resolutely - can an investor prosper over time. But for a while, a value investor typically underperforms.
Things that have never happened before are bound to occur with some regularity. You must always be prepared for the unexpected, including sudden, sharp downward swings in markets and the economy. Whatever adverse scenario you can contemplate, reality can be far worse.
Right at the core, the mainstream has it backwards. Warren Buffett often quips that the first rule of investing is to not lose money, and the second rule is to not forget the first rule. Yet few investors approach the world with such a strict standard of risk avoidance.
My view is that an investor is better off knowing a lot about a few investments than knowing a little about each of a great many holdings. One's very best idea's are likely to generate higher returns for a given level of risk than one's hundredth or thousandth best idea.
Value investing requires a great deal of hard work, unusually strict discipline, and a long-term investment horizon. Few are willing and able to devote sufficient time and effort to become value investors, and only a fraction of those have the proper mind-set to succeed.
Selling, in particular, can be a challenge; many investors are tempted to become more optimistic when a security is performing well. This temptation must be resisted; tax considerations aside, when a security reaches full valuation, there is no longer a reason to own it.
Risk is not inherent in an investment; it is always relative to the price paid. Uncertainty is not the same as risk. Indeed, when great uncertainty - such as in the fall of 2008 - drives securities prices to especially low levels, they often become less risky investments.
If an asset has cash flow or the likelihood of cash flow in the near term and is not purely dependment on what a future buyer might pay, then it's an investment. If an asset's value is totally dependent on the amount a future buyer might pay, then its purchase is speculation.
One of the biggest challenges in investing is that the opportunity set available today is not the complete opportunity set that should be considered. Limiting your opportunity set to the one immediately at hand would be like limiting your spouse to the students you met in high school
Interestingly, we have beaten the market quite handsomely over this time frame, although beating the market has never been our objective. Rather, we have consistently tried not to lose money and, in doing so, have not only protected on the downside but also outperformed on the upside.
Literally draw a detailed map-like an organization chart-of interlocking ownership and affiliates, many of which were also publicly traded. So, identifying one stock led him to a dozen other potential investments. To tirelessly pull threads is the lesson that I learned from Mike Price.
Always remembering that we might be wrong, we must contemplate alternatives, concoct hedges, and search vigilantly for validation of our assessments. We always sell when a security's price begins to reflect full value, because we are never sure that our thesis will be precisely correct.
While some might mistakenly consider value investing a mechanical tool for identifying bargains, it is actually a comprehensive investment philosophy that emphasizes the need to perform in-depth fundamental analysis, pursue long-term investment results, limit risk, and resist crowd psychology.
Pressure to produce over the short term - a gun to the head of everyone - encourages excessive risk taking which manifests itself in several ways - fully invested posture at all times, the use of leverage, and a market centric orientation that makes it difficult to stand apart from the crowd and take a long term perspective.
It's awful to have a depression, but it's a great thing to have a depression mentality because it means that we are not speculating, we are not living beyond our means, we don't quit our job to take a big risk because we know we might not get another job. There is something stable about a country, a society built on those values.
There are only a few things investors can do to counteract risk: diversify adequately, hedge when appropriate, and invest with a margin of safety. It is a precisely because we do not and cannot know all the risks of an investment that we strive to invest at a discount. The bargain element helps to provide a cushion for when things go wrong.