“The investor who permits himself to be stampeded or unduly worried by unjustified market declines in his holdings is perversely transforming his basic advantage into a basic disadvantage.”

Always buy your straw hats in the Winter

Those with the enterprise lack the money and those with the money lack the enterprise to buy stocks when they are cheap.

The beauty of periodic rebalancing is that it forces you to base your investing decisions on a simple, objective standard.

The people of the United States will not tolerate another deep depression that arises not from any lack of natural resources, productive capacity or man and brain power, but solely from imperfections in the functioning of the system of finance capitalism.

Confusing speculation with investment is always a mistake.

The market is a pendulum that forever swings between unsustainable optimism (which makes stocks too expensive) and unjustified pessimism (which makes them too cheap). The intelligent investor is a realist who sells to optimists and buys from pessimists.

Wall Street people learn nothing and forget everything.

The best values today are often found in the stocks that were once hot and have since gone cold.

Thus the important and difficult part of sound investment, which hinges upon the investor’s own temperament and attitude, is not much affected by the passing years.

For 99 issues out of 100 we could say that at some price they are cheap enough to buy and at some price they would be so dear that they would be sold.

In the short-run, the market is a voting machine – reflecting a voter-registration test that requires only money, not intelligence or emotional stability – but in the long- run, the market is a weighing machine.

The essence of investment management is the management of risks, not the management of returns.

Knowledge is only one ingredient on arriving at a stock’s proper price. The other ingredient, fully as important as information, is sound judgment.

Nothing important on Wall Street can be counted on to occur exactly in the same way as it happened before.

To see how much a company is truly earning on the capital it deploys in its businesses, look beyond EPS to Return on Invested Capital (ROIC).

Undervaluations caused by neglect or prejudice may persist for an inconveniently long time, and the same applies to inflated prices caused by over-enthusiasm or artificial stimulants.

In the financial markets, hindsight is forever 20/20, but foresight is legally blind. And thus, for most investors, market timing is a practical and emotional impossibility.

You don’t get what you want from investing, you get what you deserve.

There is a close logical connection between the concept of a safety margin and the principle of diversification.

You must never delude yourself into thinking that you’re investing when you’re speculating.

As in roulette, same is true of the stock trader, who will find that the expense of trading weights the dice heavily against him.

Thousands of people have tried, and the evidence is clear: The more you trade, the less you keep.

The best approach here, if at all possible, is to use supervisory and regulatory methods to restrain undue risk-taking and to make sure the system is resilient in case an asset-price bubble bursts in the future.

All economic movements, by their very nature, are motivated by crowd psychology.