“Your goal as an investor should simply be to purchase, at a rational price, a part interest in an easily-understandable business whose earnings are virtually certain to be materially higher five, ten and twenty years from now. Over time, you will find only a few companies that meet these standards - so when you see one that qualifies, you should buy a meaningful amount of stock. You must also resist the temptation to stray from your guidelines: If you aren't willing to own a stock for ten years, don't even think about owning it for ten minutes. ”
关键词句:你能理解的业务和模式;5年、10年、20年的稳定可靠的收入;如果不能长期持有,那么即便一分钟也不要持有。
――1996 Shareholders Letter
“The key to investing is not assessing how much an industry is going to affect society, or how much it will grow, but rather determining the competitive advantage of any given company and, above all, the durability of that advantage.”
投资的关键是:识别企业竞争力及其可持续性。
――July 1999 at Herb Allen's Sun Valley, Idaho Retreat
“There are all kinds of businesses that Charlie and I don't understand, but that doesn't cause us to stay up at night. It just means we go on to the next one, and that's what the individual investor should do.”
不理解的商业模式,那些钱不是我们应该赚的。
“If you understood a business perfectly and the future of the business, you would need very little in the way of a margin of safety. So, the more vulnerable the business is, assuming you still want to invest in it, the larger margin of safety you'd need. If you're driving a truck across a bridge that says it holds 10,000 pounds and you've got a 9,800 pound vehicle, if the bridge is 6 inches above the crevice it covers, you may feel okay, but if it's over the Grand Canyon, you may feel you want a little larger margin of safety...”
安全边际决定于你对企业商业模式及其未来的理解。一些注定长不大的企业或体质孱弱的企业,如果还要投的话,安全边际要求就更大。
――1997 Berkshire Hathaway Annual Meeting
Therefore, we adopted a strategy that required our being smart - and not too smart at that - only a very few times. Indeed, we'll now settle for one good idea a year.”
我们的策略是,明智-即不要太聪明。事实上一年有一个好的投资主意就很不错了。
“We've long felt that the only value of stock forecasters is to make fortune tellers look good. Even now, Charlie and I continue to believe that short-term market forecasts are poison and should be kept locked up in a safe place, away from children and also from grown-ups who behave in the market like children.”
市场的短期波动是不可预测的。
Success in investing doesn't correlate with I.Q. once you're above the level of 25. Once you have ordinary intelligence, what you need is the temperament to control the urges that get other people into trouble in investing.
对于投资而言,基本的常识和稳定的情绪非常重要,智商不是最重要的。
――BusinessWeek Interview June 25 1999
“Investors making purchases in an overheated market need to recognize that it may often take an extended period for the value of even an outstanding company to catch up with the price they paid.”
在一个过热的市场中,从来都不适合买入。
――Berkshire Hathaway 1998 Annual Meeting
“We don't get paid for activity, just for being right. As to how long we'll wait, we'll wait indefinitely.”
盲动不会得到好的回报,唯一需要的是理性。只要需要等待,我们宁愿无限期的等待下去。
――Berkshire Hathaway 1998 Annual Meeting
“The strategy (of portfolio concentration ) we've adopted precludes our following standard diversification dogma. Many pundits would therefore say the strategy must be riskier than that employed by more conventional investors. We disagree. We believe that a policy of portfolio concentration may well decrease risk if it raises, as it should, both the intensity with which an investor thinks about a business and the comfort-level he must feel with its economic characteristics before buying into it.”
你的理解程度决定了风险程度,而不是分散或集中配置。
――1993 Chairman's Letter to Shareholders
“The most important thing in terms of your circle of competence is not how large the area of it is, but how well you've defined the perimeter. If you know where the edges are, you're way better off than somebody that's got one that's five times as large but they get very fu about the edges.”
知之为知之,不知为不知,是知也,能力圈的核心是要有自知之明,不要超出自己的能力范围。
――“Warren Buffett Talks Business,” The University of North Carolina, Center for Public Television, Chapel Hill, 1995
“I put a heavy weight on certainty. If you do that, the whole idea of a risk factor doesn't make sense to me. Risk comes from not knowing what you're doing.”
确定性是重中之重,风险来自于无知。
――“Buffett Talks Strategy with Students”, Omaha World-Herald 1994
“View Mr. Market as having a disorder and being in a manic depressive state and take advantage of this state of disorder."
利用市场先生的不理性。
――Warren Buffett, Berkshire Hathaway Owners Manual
“I will tell you how to become rich. Close the doors. Be fearful when others are greedy. Be greedy when others are fearful.”
每次读这句都想起了李嘉诚的那句话“满街都是鲜血的时候,就是投资的最好时机”。
――Warren Buffett lecturing to a group of students at Columbia U