Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I was a little bit of a cocky kid.
You can learn investing by reading books.
The loss was not bad luck. It was bad analysis.
In the real world, illiquid assets carry a discount.
Experience is making mistakes and learning from them.
The President is the CEO of this business that we call America.
The investing world is a little bit more multidimensional than poker.
I am always prepared to do the right thing regardless of what other people think.
What is uncertain is how much further the bubble can expand, and what might pop it.
As an investor my job is to figure out what will happen rather than what should happen.
I think good private equity investors create a lot more economic value than they destroy.
There's more at risk in what happens in Microsoft than I could ever bet on a poker table.
Ive got a fantasy-baseball team with my brother. But I have to admit, he does all the work.
I've got a fantasy-baseball team with my brother. But I have to admit, he does all the work.
If I believe that I am right, I will take it to the end of the earth until I am proven right.
What do you call a stock that's down 90%? A stock that was down 80% and then got cut in half.
My parents are nice people, and they also made a point to have dinner as a family every night.
In order to be successful, you have to make sure that being rejected doesn’t bother you at all.
We never invent new reasons to continue with a position when the original reasons are no longer available.
Investing in a poker game and investing in stocks, at least the way I do it, it's a very similar skillset.
On my best days, I fancy myself a combination of Dad's persistence/patience and Mom's toughness/skepticism.
Investing is a business where you can look very silly for a long period of time before you are proven right.
Herbalife: the customers are fictitious, the business opportunity is a scam, the university degree is a fraud.
Preserving the 30-year prepayable fixed-rate mortgage - it's like the bedrock of the housing system - is critical.
Our view is that just because Amazon can disrupt somebody else's profit stream, it doesn't mean that Amazon earns that profit stream.
I love what I do. I don't do it for the money. I work on behalf of investors that I like and want to do well for. I'm a competitive person.
You have a certain set of facts and you are looking for situations where you have an edge, whether the edge is psychological or statistical.
If you look at the great frauds of all time, Enron had that phantom trading floor. What Herbalife has is it has phantom or fictitious customers.
I'm an extremely, extremely persistent person. Extremely. And when I believe I am right, and it is important, I will go to the end of the earth.
When you leave a good job to go off on your own and don't expect to make money for a while, you name the firm whatever your wife says you should.
For one thing, Greenlight only hires nice people. By that, I don't mean that we avoid hiring jerks. I mean we actively look to hire people who are nice.
Texas hold 'em is all about folding and waiting for that time that comes up every hour or two where you actually have an advantage and you can press it.
If you think of the typical Herbalife distributor and their level of sophistication, to this day I still don't understand the marketing plan - true story.
I'm not emotional about investments. Investing is something where you have to be purely rational and not let emotion affect your decision making - just the facts.
We believe in constructing the portfolio so that we put our biggest amount of money in our highest-conviction idea, and then we view the other ideas relative to that.
We try not to have many investing 'rules,' but there is one that has served us well: If we decide we were wrong about something, in terms of why we did it, we exit, period.
In my business investing, you are buying a stock, and someone else is selling the stock. Right there, that's like a debate. Is the stock going up, or is it going to go down?
A 99% Value-at-Risk calculation does not evaluate what happens in the last one percent... This is like an airbag that works all the time, except when you have a car accident.
My father and grandfather were businessmen. The family business was Adelphi Paints in New Jersey. When the first energy crisis came in the early 1970s, the business suffered.
I spent most of high school working on the debate team, probably at some expense to my grades. Being a member of the team was great training in critical analysis, organization, and logic.
Short-term market and economic prognostication is largely a fool’s errand, we invest according to a strategy that makes the need to rely on short-term market or economic assessments largely irrelevant.
Both poker and investing are games of incomplete information. You have a certain set of facts and you are looking for situations where you have an edge, whether the edge is psychological or statistical.
Microsoft could help Facebook with one of the biggest challenges, namely monetizing its traffic without reducing the user's experience. It's obvious that Microsoft needs traffic and Facebook needs search.
It is a certainty that Herbalife is a pyramid scheme. We believe it's harming a population of low-income, principally Hispanic people in the U.S. to benefit a handful of super wealthy people at the top of the pyramid.
I worked in investment banking for two years. I was in a program where they kind of just owned you. And you - I didn't realize that I've signed up for that, which was one of the problems. I didn't know anybody who'd done this.
After my undergraduate, I've written a thesis that was in the government department, but largely, it turned out almost an economic type of thesis. And I was very interested in that, and I wanted to go get a Ph.D. in Economics.
During my freshman year at Cornell, I joined my dorm's intramural football team. At the first practice, upper classmen pointed out I was tall, so I should try playing QB. Well half an hour later, it was abundantly clear that I should not be the QB.
In an industry that celebrates personal sacrifice as a symbol of commitment, you might not consider 'making sure everyone gets home for dinner' to be a mark of success, but creating and maintaining that culture is one of the things I'm most proud of.
Obviously, I wasn't expecting Wall Street to be a laid-back place. I was prepared for hard work. Sadly, much of the work the new guys were asked to do and the insane hours we were expected to keep had little to do with making the bank more productive. It felt more like hazing.
I think a very good system in a world with a lot of passive investors is one in which there are at least a few entrepreneurial investors, prepared to say what they think, prepared to propose a change in management, change in strategy, change in cost structure, capital structure.