主题： Investing

If merely looking up past financial data would tell you what the future holds, the Forbes 400 would consist of librarians. The unsophisticated investor who is realistic about his shortcomings is likely to obtain better long-term results than the knowledgeable professional who is blind to even a single weakness. Draw a circle around the businesses you understand and then eliminate those that fail to qualify on the basis of value, good management, and limited exposure to hard times.

I don’t know a thing now that I didn’t know at 19 when I read [Benjamin Graham’s The Intelligent Investor]. For eight years prior to that I was a chartist. I loved all that stuff. I had charts coming out my ears. Then, all of a sudden a fellow explains to me that you don’t need all that, just buy something for less than it’s worth.

Degree of difficulty counts in the Olympics; it doesn’t count in business. You don’t get any extra points for the fact that something’s very hard to do, so you might as well step over one-foot bars rather than try to jump over seven-foot bars.

The best way to think about investments is to be in a room with no one else and to just think. If that doesn’t work, nothing else is going to work. Success in investing doesn’t correlate with IQ once you’re above the level of 25. Once you have ordinary intelligence, what you need is the temperament to control the urges that get other people into trouble in investing.

What we do is not beyond anybody else’s competence. I feel the same way about managing that I do about investing: It’s just not necessary to do extraordinary things to get extraordinary results.

When I buy a stock, I think of it in terms of buying a whole company just as if I were buying a store down the street. If I were buying the store, I’d want to know all about it.

In the investment world, if you had a punch card when you got out of school, and there were only 20 punches on it, and when that was done, you were all done investing, you’d make more money than having one with unlimited punches. You’d make sure you used them for the right things.

I call investing the greatest business in the world, because you never have to swing. You stand at the plate, the pitcher throws you General Motors at 47! U.S. Steel at 39! And nobody calls a strike on you. There’s no penalty except for the opportunity lost. All day you wait for the pitch you like; then when the fielders are asleep, you step up and hit it.

Ted Williams described in his book, The Science of Hitting, that the most important thing—for a hitter—is to wait for the right pitch. And that’s exactly the philosophy I have about investing. Wait for the right pitch, and wait for the right deal. And it will come. It’s the key to investing.

Games are won by players who focus on the playing field—not by those whose eyes are glued to the scoreboard. If you can enjoy Saturdays and Sundays without looking at stock prices, give it a try on weekdays.