主题： Investing

The nature of Wall Street is that overall it makes a lot of money relative to the number of people involved, relative to the IQ of the people involved, and relative to the energy expended. They work hard, they’re bright, but … they don’t work that much harder or [aren’t] that much brighter than somebody that … is building a dam someplace, you know, or a whole lot of other jobs.

Many helpers [investment advisors] are apparently direct descendants of the queen in Alice in Wonderland, who said: “Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.” Beware the glib helper who fills your head with fantasies while he fills his pockets with fees.

Bad terminology is the enemy of good thinking. When companies or investment professionals use terms such as EBITDA or pro forma, they want you to unthinkingly accept concepts that are dangerously flawed. (In golf, my score is frequently below par on a pro forma basis: I have firm plans to restructure my putting stroke and therefore only count the swings I take before reaching the green.)

You’re dealing with a lot of silly people in the marketplace; it’s like a great big casino and everyone else is boozing. If you can stick with Pepsi, you should be okay. Almost everybody I know in Wall Street has had as many good ideas as I have, they just had a lot of [bad] ideas too. It’s always possible when you get a big asset class that moves on price that after a while, people forget about what the asset class represents and just get entranced with the fact that it went up a lot last week or last month and that their neighbor, who’s dumber than they are, had made a lot of money and now their wife is telling them, you know, why aren’t you in gold or whatever it may be that’s—or Internet stocks.

We don’t try to profit from bubbles. We just try to avoid going broke from them, and so far we’ve been OK.

Those investors who cling now to cash are betting they can efficiently time their move away from it later. In waiting for the comfort of good news, they are ignoring Wayne Gretzky’s advice: “I skate to where the puck is going to be, not to where it has been.”

Stock prices will always be far more volatile than cash-equivalent holdings. Over the long term, however, currency-denominated instruments are riskier investments—far riskier investments—than widely-diversified stock portfolios that are bought over time and that are owned in a manner invoking only token fees and commissions.

If you and I buy various cryptocurrency they’re not gonna multiply. They’re not gonna be a bunch of rabbits sitting there in front of us. They’re just gonna sit there. I would have a course on how to value a business, and I would have a course on how to think about markets. And I think if people grasped the basic principles in those two courses that they would be far better off than if they were exposed to a lot of things like modern portfolio theory or option pricing. Who needs option pricing to be in an investment business?

I do not like short-term bonds, and I do not like long-term bonds. And if you push me, I’m sure that I don’t like intermediate-term bonds either. I just think it’s a terrible mistake to buy into fixed-dollar investments at these kinds of rates.

The problem with commodities is that you’re betting on what somebody else will pay for them in six months. The commodity itself isn’t going to do anything for you.