Tag: Warren Buffett

If there is one thing Warren Buffett is clear about, it is that gambling type of behavior, whether it is in the stock market or just buying a lottery ticket, will lead an investor astray. And, as opportunities to speculate look ever more enticing, it’s most important to remember that just because you can gamble doesn’t mean that you should.

“People win lotteries every day, but there’s no reason to have that effect you at all. You shouldn’t be jealous about it,” Buffett said at the 2016 Berkshire Hathaway Annual Meeting. “If they want to do mathematically unsound things, and one of them occasionally gets lucky, and they put the one person on television, and the million that contributed to the winnings, with the big slice taken out for the state, you know, don’t get on, it’s nothing to worry about. Just, all you have to do is figure out what makes sense. . . . When you buy a stock, you get yourself in the mental frame of mind that you’re buying a business, and if you don’t look at a quote on it for five years, that’s fine. You don’t get a quote on your farm every day or every week or every month. You don’t get it on your apartment house, if you own one. If you own a McDonald’s franchise, you don’t get a quote every day. You know, you want to look at your stocks as businesses, and think about their performance as businesses. Think about what you pay for them, as you would think about buying a business, and let the rest of the world go its own way. You don’t want to get into a stupid game just because it’s available.”

Buffett’s full explanation about lotteries and markets

See the complete Lessons From Warren Buffett series

© 2021 David Mazor

Disclosure: David Mazor is a freelance writer focusing on Berkshire Hathaway. The author is long in Berkshire Hathaway, and this article is not a recommendation on whether to buy or sell the stock. The information contained in this article should not be construed as personalized or individualized investment advice. Past performance is no guarantee of future results.

Investors often think that to be a great investor they need a complicated approach. It is as if they think that the more arcane their investment strategy is the more rewarding it will be. Warren Buffett disagrees.

“You don’t have to do exceptional things to get exceptional results,” Warren Buffett noted at the 1994 Berkshire Hathaway Annual Meeting. “And some people think that if you jump over a seven-foot bar that the ribbon they pin on you is going to be worth more money than if you step over a one-foot bar. And it just isn’t true in the investment world, at all.”

Buffett’s full explanation on keeping investing simple

See the complete Lessons From Warren Buffett series

© 2021 David Mazor

Disclosure: David Mazor is a freelance writer focusing on Berkshire Hathaway. The author is long in Berkshire Hathaway, and this article is not a recommendation on whether to buy or sell the stock. The information contained in this article should not be construed as personalized or individualized investment advice. Past performance is no guarantee of future results.

“I have conquered envy in my own life. I don’t envy anybody,” Charlie Munger said. “I don’t give a damn what someone else has. But other people are driven crazy by it.”

It is something that Warren Buffett sees as almost inevitable for a certain type of investor. What type of investors are they? They are investors that always have their eyes on somebody else’s portfolio.

“There’s nothing more agonizing than to see your neighbor, who you think has an IQ about 30 points below you, getting richer than you are by buying stocks,” Buffett explained at the 2017 Berkshire Hathaway Annual Meeting. “And whether it’s internet stocks or whatever… and people succumb to it.”

Buffett’s full explanation about speculation and markets

See the complete Lessons From Warren Buffett series

© 2021 David Mazor

Disclosure: David Mazor is a freelance writer focusing on Berkshire Hathaway. The author is long in Berkshire Hathaway, and this article is not a recommendation on whether to buy or sell the stock. The information contained in this article should not be construed as personalized or individualized investment advice. Past performance is no guarantee of future results.

Turn on the financial news and you will see a steady stream of predictions as to the stock market’s overall direction. What is more routine at the beginning of the year than pundits predicting where the market will be at the end of the year? Will it hit a new high? Will it plummet? It clearly fascinates a lot of people, but not Warren Buffett, who sees those types of predictions as a waste of time.

“You may have trouble believing this, but Charlie and I never have an opinion about the market because it wouldn’t be any good and it might interfere with the opinions we have that are good,” Warren Buffett said at the 1994 Berkshire Hathaway Annual Meeting. “If we’re right about a business, if we think a business is attractive, it would be very foolish for us to not take action on that because we thought something about what the market was going to do, or anything of that sort. Because we just don’t know. And to give up something that you do know and that is profitable for something that you don’t know and won’t know because of that, it just doesn’t make any sense to us, and it doesn’t really make any difference to us.”

Buffett’s full explanation on investing and the direction of the stock market

See the complete Lessons From Warren Buffett series

© 2021 David Mazor

Disclosure: David Mazor is a freelance writer focusing on Berkshire Hathaway. The author is long in Berkshire Hathaway, and this article is not a recommendation on whether to buy or sell the stock. The information contained in this article should not be construed as personalized or individualized investment advice. Past performance is no guarantee of future results.

You picked a winner and it’s shot up through the roof. Time to sell and buy back later at a lower price?

Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger advise against it.

“Generally speaking, trying to dance in and out of the companies you really love, on a long term basis, has not been a good idea for most investors,” Charlie Munger explained at the 1999 Berkshire Hathaway Annual Meeting.

Warren Buffett concurred: “It’s pretty tough to do,” Buffett added. “You have to make two decisions right . . . you have to sell it right first, and then you have to buy it right later on . . . . If you get in to a wonderful business, best thing to do is stick with it.”

Buffett and Munger’s full explanation on trying to sell and buy back

See the complete Lessons From Warren Buffett series

© 2020 David Mazor

Disclosure: David Mazor is a freelance writer focusing on Berkshire Hathaway. The author is long in Berkshire Hathaway, and this article is not a recommendation on whether to buy or sell the stock. The information contained in this article should not be construed as personalized or individualized investment advice. Past performance is no guarantee of future results.

Warren Buffett places a strong emphasis on a company’s intrinsic value in determining whether the company should be purchased in whole or in part. Whether a company is undervalued or overvalued is at the heart of knowing whether it is a good investment. The same applies to the stock market as a whole.

So, is there a straightforward formula that you can use to determine valuation? Not according to Warren Buffett.

“It’s not reducible to any formula where you can actually put in the variables perfectly,” Warren Buffett explained at the 2017 Berkshire Hathaway Annual Meeting. “It’s just not quite as simple as having one or two formulas and, then, saying the market is undervalued or overvalued, or a company is undervalued or overvalued.”

As he noted, you can have a formula, but the hard part is knowing what variables to put in.

Warren Buffett’s full explanation on determining valuation

See the complete Lessons From Warren Buffett series

© 2020 David Mazor

Disclosure: David Mazor is a freelance writer focusing on Berkshire Hathaway. The author is long in Berkshire Hathaway, and this article is not a recommendation on whether to buy or sell the stock. The information contained in this article should not be construed as personalized or individualized investment advice. Past performance is no guarantee of future results.

You don’t have to be a genius to be an investor, is something that Warren Buffett has said many times. However, there are things that he thinks are core qualities of successful investors.

So, what is it that Warren Buffett thinks is essential? Discipline.

“What we do is not a complicated business.” Buffett explained at the 2018 Berkshire Hathaway Annual Meeting. “It’s got to be a disciplined business, but it doesn’t require a super IQ, or anything of that sort.”

Buffett’s full explanation on being a disciplined investor

See the complete Lessons From Warren Buffett series

© 2021 David Mazor

Disclosure: David Mazor is a freelance writer focusing on Berkshire Hathaway. The author is long in Berkshire Hathaway, and this article is not a recommendation on whether to buy or sell the stock. The information contained in this article should not be construed as personalized or individualized investment advice. Past performance is no guarantee of future results.

There is no one that wants to have a lousy business, but as Warren Buffett points out, you certainly learn a lot of lessons from it. Among the things you learn are “how awful it is, and how little you can do about it, and how IQ does not solve the problem. . . ”

As Buffett noted: “I really think if you want to be a good evaluator of businesses, an investor, you really ought to figure out a way, without too much personal damage, to run a lousy business for a while,” Buffett explained at the 2017 Berkshire Hathaway Annual Meeting. “I think you learn a whole lot more about business by actually struggling with a terrible business for a couple of years than you learn by getting into a very good one where the business itself is so good that you can’t mess it up.”

Buffett’s full explanation about learning from running a lousy business

See the complete Lessons From Warren Buffett series

© 2020 David Mazor

Disclosure: David Mazor is a freelance writer focusing on Berkshire Hathaway. The author is long in Berkshire Hathaway, and this article is not a recommendation on whether to buy or sell the stock. The information contained in this article should not be construed as personalized or individualized investment advice. Past performance is no guarantee of future results.

In the frenzied world of financial news, where the Dow can soar or plummet in the blink of an eye, it is the market’s capricious dance that captures the collective gaze. But should we, if we seek to walk in the footsteps of the legendary Warren Buffett, succumb to this tantalizing spectacle? The answer, resounds with a resolute “no.” For Warren Buffett, the stock market’s caprices hold little sway. To invest like Buffett is to look beyond the tumultuous fluctuations and fix one’s gaze upon the essence of individual businesses, where true value lies.

“Charlie and I don’t think about the market. And Ben (Graham) didn’t very much. I think he made a mistake to occasionally try and place a value on it,” Buffett explained at the 1999 Berkshire Hathaway annual meeting. “We look at individual businesses, and we don’t think of stocks as little items that wiggle around on the paper and have charts attached to them. We think of them as parts of businesses.”

Buffett’s full explanation on focusing on individual companies rather than the market

See the complete Lessons From Warren Buffett series

© 2020 David Mazor

Disclosure: David Mazor is a freelance writer focusing on Berkshire Hathaway. The author is long in Berkshire Hathaway, and this article is not a recommendation on whether to buy or sell the stock. The information contained in this article should not be construed as personalized or individualized investment advice. Past performance is no guarantee of future results.

A company’s stock price goes up and up, seemingly disassociated from any meaningful metrics of valuation. So, should you short it?

It may be tempting, but Warren Buffett advises against it.

“Short selling, it’s an interesting item to study because it’s, I mean, it’s ruined a lot of people. It’s the sort of thing that you can go broke doing,” Buffett explained at the 2001 Berkshire Hathaway Annual Meeting. “Being short where your loss is unlimited is quite different than being long something that you’ve already paid for. And it’s tempting. You see way more stocks that are dramatically overvalued in your career than you will see stocks that are dramatically undervalued.”

Buffett’s full explanation on short selling

See the complete Lessons From Warren Buffett series

© 2020 David Mazor

Disclosure: David Mazor is a freelance writer focusing on Berkshire Hathaway. The author is long in Berkshire Hathaway, and this article is not a recommendation on whether to buy or sell the stock. The information contained in this article should not be construed as personalized or individualized investment advice. Past performance is no guarantee of future results.