Mohnish Pabrai Quotations

Mistakes are the best teachers. One does not learn from success. It is desirable to learn vicariously from other people's failures, but it gets much more firmly seared in when they are your own.

I have a hard time getting past the day without the nap, so the nap is a must.

There is no such thing as a value trap. There are investing mistakes.

The good news in investing is there are no HR problems. If there are no humans, there are no problems!

Basically if you study entrepreneurs, there is a misnomer: People think that entrepreneurs take risk, and they get rewarded because they take risk. In reality entrepreneurs do everything they can to minimize risk. They are not interested in taking risk. They want free lunches and they go after free lunches.

We Americans love original ideas. But truly, there are already plenty of good ones out there, ours for the taking. If I were too proud to copy the ideas of others, I likely wouldnt have even a fraction of my current success.

Entrepreneurs are great at dealing with uncertainty and also very good at minimizing risk. That's the classic great entrepreneur.

I think a lot of people are getting more serious about how to do the most good, but there is no road map. I'm hoping I can offer an example.

The problem most nonprofits have is that they are run by romantics who are great to hang out with, but they have no clue.

Industries with rapid change are the enemy of the investor. Tech businesses, particularly biotech, is a problem from that point of view. All industries work with change, but you should ideally be investing in businesses with a low rate of change, not a high rate of change.

People see poverty all around them in India, but they are desensitized or immune to it. I came to the conclusion that poverty is driven by lack of education.

You know, my degrees are in computer engineering. I spent a lot of time in the tech industry. And I like to say that I don't invest in tech because I spent time in it. And I saw firsthand that the durability of technology moats is many times an oxymoron.

Warren Buffett has said many times that people either get value investing in five minutes or they won't get it in five years. So, there is something in the human brain, that for some of us, makes all the difference in the world right away and the patience it requires is part of the wiring process.

The only way one should buy stocks is if you understand the underlying business. You stay within the circle of competence. You buy businesses you understand.

Heads I win, tails I don’t lose much.

Wall Street sometimes gets confused between risk and uncertainty, and you can profit handsomely from that confusion. The low-risk, high-uncertainty [situation] gives us our most sought after coin-toss odds. Heads, I win; tails, I don't lose much.

You don’t make money when you buy stocks. And you don’t make money when you sell stocks. You make money by waiting.