Quotes

Avoiding round trips and short-term devastation enables you to be around for the long term.

The prevailing view has been that the market will earn a high rate of return if the holding period is long enough, but entry point is what really matters.

I am much more inclined to buy a stock that has been kicked out of an index because then it may have value characteristics -- it has underperformed.

The line I draw in the sand is that if an asset has cash flow or the likelihood of cash flow in the near term and is not purely dependent on what a future buyer might pay, then it’s an investment. If an asset’s value is totally dependent on the amount a future buyer might pay, then its purchase is speculation.

We try to protect against tail risk: the risk of unlikely but possible events that could be catastrophic.

A cheap stock can stay cheap forever, but if you own a bankrupt bond, the process of emerging from bankruptcy and distributing new securities offers a practical catalyst to realize the value.

All investors need to learn how to be at peace with their decisions.

When the markets are fairly ebullient, investors tend to hold the least objectionable securities rather than the truly significant bargains.

Investing is buying a fractional interest in a business and buying debt claims on a business.

The laws of probabilities tell us that almost anyone can achieve phenomenal success over any given measurement period. It is the task of those evaluating a money manager to ascertain how much of past success is due to luck and how much to skill.

The question we ask ourselves is, ''What would we be willing to pay to own a security forever?'' Then we determine whether we can buy it at a discount from that figure.

We try to buy dollars for 50 cents, and to realize the dollar before too much time passes.