Warren Buffett Quotes

We're going to move a lot of crude (oil) in this country, and we have to learn how to do it very safely. "Buffett: Moving Oil By Rail Safely Is A Major Industry Concern" Investing.com (24 April 2014)

Risk comes from not knowing what you're doing. "The Three Essential Warren Buffett Quotes To Live By" forbes.com (20 April 2014)

There will continue to be wide discrepancies between price and value in the marketplace, and those who read their Graham and Dodd will continue to prosper.

[T]he secret has been out for 50 years, ever since Ben Graham and Dave Dodd wrote Security Analysis, yet I have seen no trend toward in... 35 years... There seems to be some perverse human characteristic that likes to make easy things difficult.

You... have to have the knowledge to... make a very general estimate about the value of the underlying businesses. But you do not cut it close. That is what Ben Graham meant by having a margin of safety.

The Washington Post Company in 1973 was selling for $80 million in the market. ...[Y]ou could have sold the assets ...for not less than $400 million ...Now, if the stock had declined even further... to $40 million... its beta would have been greater. ...This is truly Alice in Wonderland. I have never been able to figure out why it's riskier to buy $400 million worth of properties for $40 million than for $80 million.

The greater the potential for reward in the value portfolio, the less risk there is.

When the price of a stock can be influenced by a "herd" on Wall Street with prices set at the margin by the most emotional person, or the greediest person, or the most depressed person, it is hard to argue that the market always prices rationally. In fact, market prices are often nonsensical.

I'm convinced that there is much inefficiency in the market.

It's not like I am reciting... the names of a bunch of lottery winners. ...I knew what they had been taught and ...had some personal knowledge of their intellect, character and temperament. ...[T]his group has assumed far less risk than average; note their record in years when the general market is weak. While they differ greatly in style, these investors are, mentally, always buying the business, not buying the stock. ...[A]ll exploit the difference between the market price of a business and its intrinsic value.

Very, very few s are managed from a value standpoint.

Stan [Perlmeter] was a liberal arts major... We happened to be in the same building... Again, it took five minutes for Stan to embrace the value approach.

[T]he idea of buying dollar bills for 40 cents takes immediately with people or it doesn't take at all. It's like an inoculation. ...It doesn't seem to be a matter of I.Q. or academic training. It's instant recognition, or it's nothing.

Tom [Knapp] was a chemistry major at Princeton before the war; when he came back... he was a beach bum. And then one day he read that Dave Dodd was giving a night course in investments at Columbia. Tom took it on a non-credit basis, and he got so interested... that he enrolled at Columbia Business School where he got the MBA... He took Dodd's course again, and took Ben Graham's course. ...35 years later ...I found him on the beach ...he owns the beach!

Walter never went to college, but took a course from Ben Graham at night at the . Walter left Graham-Newman [Partnership] in 1955... He knows how to identify securities that sell at considerably less than their value to a private owner. And that's all he does. ...He simply says, if a business is worth a dollar and I can buy it for 40 cents, something good may happen to me. And he does it over and over again.