Imagine the big rating agencies as three competitive saloons standing side by side, with each free to set its own drinking age. Before long, nine-year-olds would be downing bourbon
Buffett found it 'extraordinary' that academics studied such things. They studied what was measurable, rather than what was meaningful. 'As a friend [Charlie Munger] said, to a man with a hammer, ever...
Buffett's uncommon urge to chronicle made him a unique character in American life, not only a great capitalist but the Great Explainer of American capitalism. He taught a generation how to think about...
The modern spirit is a hesitant one. Spontaneity has given way to cautious legalisms, and the age of heroes has been superseded by a cult of specialization. We have no more giants; only obedient ants.
Buffett's methodology was straightforward, and in that sense 'simple.' It was not simple in the sense of being easy to execute. Valuing companies such as Coca-Cola took a wisdom forged by years of exp...
As Peter Bernstein has written, nature's pattern emerges only from the chaotic disorder of many random events.
A compact organization lets all of us spend our time managing the business rather than managing each other.
Being right on a stock had something of the purity of a perfect move in chess; it had an intellectual resonance.
Buffett does enjoy being a billionaire, but in offbeat ways. As he put it, though money cannot change your health or how many people love you, it lets you be in 'more interesting environments.
The public shareholders who invested with Buffett also got rich, and in exactly the same proportion to their capital that Buffett did. The numbers themselves are almost inconceivable. If one had inves...
Finance is often poetically just; it punishes the reckless with special fervor.
Investors long for steady waters, but paradoxically, the opportunities are richest when markets turn turbulent.
Buffett’s genius was largely a genius of character—of patience, discipline, and rationality.
VARIOUS OTHER BANKERS—heirs to the Indianapolis convention—carried on the fight for reform. However, unlike Warburg, they favored establishing an asset currency, a decentralized scheme based on each i...
The professors' conceit was to think that models could forecast the limits of behavior. In fact, the models could tell them what was reasonable or what was predictable based on the past. The professor...
Once a typhoon breaks loose in markets, there is no telling where it will go.
Merton ... humbly warned, however, It's a wrong perception to believe that you can eliminate risk just because you can measure it.
Graham’s first goal was never to make money—it was to avoid losing any.
Bundy sternly tool his fellow endowment fund managers to task - not for being too bold, but for being insufficiently so:We have the preliminary impression that over the long run caution has cost our c...
But after Kapor took Merton's finance course, he decided that quantitative finance was less a science than a faith - a doctrine for ideologues blinded by the power of the model. It appealed to intelle...