Warren Buffett On The Stock Market: Best Quotes And Advice From The Famed Billionaire Investor

Warren Buffet is one of the world’s most respected investors, and at 88 years of age, is still working as the CEO and chairman of Berkshire Hathaway. He is also one of the wealthiest people in the world with a net worth of about $84 billion.

Over the many years he has been investing, scores of quotes have been attributed to him in various media outlets on a range of topics -- here are some of his investing insights.



- “What an investor needs is the ability to correctly evaluate selected businesses. Note that word "selected": You don't have to be an expert on every company, or even many. You only have to be able to evaluate companies within your circle of competence. The size of that circle is not very important; knowing its boundaries, however, is vital.”



- "I will tell you how to become rich. Close the doors. Be fearful when others are greedy. Be greedy when others are fearful."

- “I've seen more people fail because of liquor and leverage -- leverage being borrowed money. You really don't need leverage in this world much. If you're smart, you're going to make a lot of money without borrowing."



- "The most important quality for an investor is temperament, not intellect. You need a temperament that neither derives great pleasure from being with the crowd or against the crowd."



- "Successful Investing takes time, discipline and patience. No matter how great the talent or effort, some things just take time: You can't produce a baby in one month by getting nine women pregnant."



- "I don't look to jump over seven-foot bars; I look around for one-foot bars that I can step over."

- "Opportunities come infrequently. When it rains gold, put out the bucket, not the thimble."

- "If you aren't willing to own a stock for ten years, don't even think about owning it for ten minutes. Put together a portfolio of companies whose aggregate earnings march upward over the years, and so also will the portfolio's market value."



- "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."



- "I am a better investor because I am a businessman, and a better businessman because I am an investor."



- "It's far better to buy a wonderful company at a fair price than a fair company at a wonderful price."



- "You're dealing with a lot of silly people in the marketplace; it's like a great big casino and everyone else is boozing. If you can stick with Pepsi, you should be O.K."

- "After 25 years of buying and supervising a great variety of businesses, Charlie and I have not learned how to solve difficult business problems. What we have learned is to avoid them. To the extent we have been successful, it is because we concentrated on identifying one-foot hurdles that we could step over rather than because we acquired any ability to clear seven-footers."

- "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."

- "At Berkshire, we make no attempt to pick the few winners that will emerge from an ocean of unproven enterprises. We're not smart enough to do that, and we know it. Instead, we try to apply Aesop's 2,600-year-old equation to opportunities in which we have reasonable confidence as to how many birds are in the bush…”

The reference is to the saying, “A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush.”

He explained how this simple premise applies to investing, “First, how certain are you this company will grow, or even has birds in the bush? Second, how long will it take for the birds to leave the bush? And lastly, your bird in the hand is long-term U.S. bonds..."

- "But a pin lies in wait for every bubble. And when the two eventually meet, a new wave of investors learns some very old lessons: First, many in Wall Street -- a community in which quality control is not prized -- will sell investors anything they will buy. Second, speculation is most dangerous when it looks easiest.”



- "The stock market is a no-called-strike game. You don't have to swing at everything -- you can wait for your pitch. The problem when you're a money manager is that your fans keep yelling, 'Swing, you bum!'"

- "I call investing the greatest business in the world ... because you never have to swing. You stand at the plate, the pitcher throws you General Motors at 47! U.S. Steel at 39! and nobody calls a strike on you. There's no penalty except opportunity lost. All day you wait for the pitch you like; then when the fielders are asleep, you step up and hit it."

- "Different people understand different businesses. And the important thing is to know which ones you do understand and when you're operating within what I call your circle of competence."

- “On the margin of safety, which means, don't try and drive a 9,800-pound truck over a bridge that says it's, you know, capacity: 10,000 pounds. But go down the road a little bit and find one that says, capacity: 15,000 pounds." 


21. "And I read Ben's [The Intelligent Investor] book in 1949 when I was at University of Nebraska, and that actually just changed my whole view of investing. And it really did, basically, told me to think about a stock as a part of a business …”

- "Cryptocurrencies will come to bad endings."

- ​"In the short term, the market is a popularity contest. In the long term, the market is a weighing machine."

This next quote, on the important of learning, is about Buffet but from Charlie Munger, one of his closest associates: “If we had been frozen at any given stage, with the knowledge we had, the record would have been much worse than it is. So the game is to keep learning, and I don't think people are going to keep learning who don't like the learning process.”