Charlie Munger Sting Quotations

Berkshire was built on the eternal verities: basic mathematics, basic horse sense, basic fear, and basic diagnosis of human nature to make predictions regarding human behavior. We stuck to the basics with a certain amount of discipline and it has worked out quite well.

The only intelligence investing is value investing...to acquire more than one is paying for.

One of the first big bubbles, of course, was the huge and horrible South Sea Bubble in England. And the aftermath was interesting. Many of you probably don't remember what happened after the South Sea Bubble, which caused an enormous financial contraction, and a lot of pain. They banned publicly traded stock in England for decades.

Investing is where you find a few great companies and then sit on your ass.

As I talk about strengths and weaknesses in academic economics, one interesting fact you are entitled to know is that I never took a course in economics. And with this striking lack of credentials, you may wonder why I have the chutzpah to be up here giving this talk. The answer is I have a black belt in chutzpah. I was born with it.

You're looking for a mispriced gamble. That's what investing is. And you have to know enough to know whether the gamble is mispriced. That's value investing.

Warren spends 70 hours a week thinking about investing .

It's not supposed to be easy. Anyone who finds it easy is stupid.

All sensible investing is value investing

Learn how to ignore the examples from others when they are wrong, because few skills are more worth having.

Hard work, honesty, if you keep at it, will get you almost anything.

You've got to have models in your head and you've got to array you experience - both vicarious and direct - onto this latticework of mental models.

Here's one truth that perhaps your typical investment counselor would disagree with: if you're comfortably rich and someone else is getting richer faster than you by, for example, investing in risky stocks, so what?! Someone will always be getting richer faster than you. This is not a tragedy.

The idea of excessive diversification is madness. Wide diversification, which necessarily includes investment in mediocre businesses, only guarantees ordinary results.

The interesting thing is the field is so big - it's enormous. One thing a modern civilization needs is energy.

You must value the business in order to value the stock.

The whole concept of dividing it up into 'value' and 'growth' strikes me as twaddle. It's convenient for a bunch of pension fund consultants to get fees prattling about and a way for one advisor to distinguish himself from another. But, to me, all intelligent investing is value investing.

Our job is to find a few intelligent things to do, not to keep up with every damn thing in the world.

All intelligent investing is value investing - acquiring more that you are paying for. You must value the business in order to value the stock.

If (investing) weren't a little difficult, everybody would be rich.

When someone takes their existing business and tries to transform it into something else - they fail. In technology that is often the case. Look at Kodak: it was the dominant imaging company in the world. They did fabulously during the great depression, but then wiped out the shareholders because of technological change.