Charlie Munger Quotes - Page 9

Quotes about:

• Even bright people are going to have limited, really valuable insights in a very competitive world when they're fighting against other very bright, hardworking people. And it makes sense to load up on the very few good insights you have instead of pretending to know everything about everything at all times.

  Charlie Munger

  Fighting, People, World

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• Anytime anybody offers you anything with a big commission and a 200-page prospectus, don't buy it. Occasionally, you'll be wrong if you adopt "Munger's Rule." However, over a lifetime, you'll be a long way ahead - and you will miss a lot of unhappy experiences.

  Charlie Munger

  Long, Missing, Unhappy

  "A Lesson on Elementary, Worldly Wisdom as it Relates to Investment Management and Business". Charlie Munger's lecture to the students at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, 1994.

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• Rationality is not just something you do so that you can make more money, it is a binding principle. Rationality is a really good idea. You must avoid the nonsense that is conventional in one's own time. It requires developing systems of thought that improve your batting average over time.

  Charlie Munger

  Average, Ideas, Principles

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• One metric catches people. We prefer businesses that drown in cash. An example of a different business is construction equipment. You work hard all year and there is your profit sitting in the yard. We avoid businesses like that. We prefer those that can write us a check at the end of the year.

  Charlie Munger

  Writing, Hard Work, Years

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• Trying to prioritize among things we're unlikely to do is pretty fruitless.

  Charlie Munger

  Trying, Unlikely, Prioritize

  Charlie Munger's comments on Berkshire Hathaway at the 2004 Berkshire Hathaway Annual Meeting, www.tilsonfunds.com. May 1, 2004.

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• Our success has come from the lack of oversight we've provided, and our success will continue to be from a lack of oversight. But if you're going to provide minimal oversight, you have to buy carefully. It's a different model from GE's. GE's works - it's just very different from ours.

  Charlie Munger

  Different, Working It, Oversight

  "Charlie Munger: The Complete Investor". Book by Tren Griffin, September 15, 2015.

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• The Berkshire-style investors tend to be less diversified than other people. The academics have done a terrible disservice to intelligent investors by glorifying the idea of diversification. Because I just think the whole concept is literally almost insane. It emphasizes feeling good about not having your investment results depart very much from average investment results. But why would you get on the bandwagon like that if somebody didn't make you with a whip and a gun?

  Charlie Munger

  Thinking, Gun, Intelligent

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

  Charlie Munger

  Intelligent, Order, Investing

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• If the same family were always on the bottom, then you'd have big resentments. But if DuPonts go down and Pampered Chef up, [that's good]. That much churn makes people think the system is fairer. Buffett: We don't like churn now, but we liked it more 30-40 years ago.

  Charlie Munger

  Thinking, Years, People

  Charlie Munger's advice on life and other at the 2003 Berkshire Hathaway Annual Meeting, www.tilsonfunds.com. May 3, 2003.

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• A lot of share-buying, not bargain-seeking, is designed to prop stock prices up. Thirty to 40 years ago, it was very profitable to look at companies that were aggressively buying their own shares. They were motivated simply to buy below what it was worth.

  Charlie Munger

  Years, Looks, Buying

  "Berkshire Behind the Scenes: Part 3". Interview with Rick Casterline, www.fool.com. May 30, 2006.

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• Our approach has worked for us. Look at the fun we, our managers, and our shareholders are having. More people should copy us. It's not difficult, but it looks difficult because it's unconventional - it isn't the way things are normally done. We have low overhead, don't have quarterly goals and budgets or a standard personnel system, and our investing is much more concentrated than average. It's simple and common sense.

  Charlie Munger

  Fun, Simple, Average

  "Charlie Munger Speaks". Charlie Munger's comments on Berkshire Hathaway and Wesco at the 2000 Wesco Financial Annual Meeting, www.fool.com. May 15, 2000.

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• Of course the self-serving bias is something you want to get out of yourself. Thinking that what's good for you is good for the wider civilization and rationalizing all these ridiculous conclusions based on this subconscious tendency to serve one's self is a terribly inaccurate way to think.

  Charlie Munger

  Thinking, Self, Civilization

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• The harder you work, the more confidence you get. But you may be working hard on something that is false.

  Charlie Munger

  Simplicity, Insightful, May

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• The model I like to sort of simplify the notion of what goes on in a market for common stocks is the pari-mutuel system at the racetrack. If you stop to think about it, a pari-mutuel system is a market. Everybody goes there and bets and the odds change based on what's bet. That's what happens in the stock market.

  Charlie Munger

  Thinking, Odds, Goes On

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• The hedge fund known as "Long Term Capital Management" collapsed last fall through overconfidence in its highly leveraged methods, despite I.Q.'s of its principals that must have averaged 160. Smart people aren't exempt from professional disasters from overconfidence. Often, they just run aground in the more difficult voyages they choose, relying on their self-appraisals that they have superior talents and methods.

  Charlie Munger

  Running, Smart, Fall

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• The possibility that stock value in aggregate can become irrationally high is contrary to the hard-form "efficient market" theory that many of you once learned as gospel from your mistaken professors of yore. Your mistaken professors were too much influenced by "rational man" models of human behavior from economics and too little by "foolish man" models from psychology and real-world experience.

  Charlie Munger

  Real, Men, Foolish Man

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• To us, investing is the equivalent of going out and betting against the pari-mutuel system. We look for a horse with one chance in two of winning, and that pays three to one. In other words, we're looking for a mispriced gamble. That's what investing is, and you have to know enough to know whether the gamble is mispriced.

  Charlie Munger

  Horse, Winning, Two

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• In the corporate world, if you have analysts, due diligence, and no horse sense, you've just described hell.

  Charlie Munger

  Horse, World, Due Diligence

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• The cash register did more for human morality than the Congregational Church. It was a really powerful phenomenon to make an economic system work better, just as, in reverse, a system that can be easily defrauded ruins a civilization. A system that's very hard to defraud, like a cash register, helped the economic performance of a civilization by reducing vice, but very few people within economics talk about it in those terms.

  Charlie Munger

  Powerful, Civilization, People

  "Academic Economics: Strengths and Faults After Considering Interdisciplinary Needs". Charlie Munger's Herb Kay Undergraduate Lecture at the Economics Department of University of California in Santa Barbara, October 3, 2003.

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• I have a black belt in chutzpah. I was born with it. Some people, like some of the women I know, have a black belt in spending. They were born with that. But what they gave me was a black belt in chutzpah.

  Charlie Munger

  People, Black, Born

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• There are a lot of things in life way more important than money. All that said, some people do get confused. I play golf with a man who says, " What good is health? You can't buy money with it."

  Charlie Munger

  Confused, Golf, Men

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• Those who keep learning, will keep rising in life

  Charlie Munger

  Rising, Keep Learning

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• If you turn on the television, you'll find the mothers of the most obvious criminals that man could ever diagnose, and they all think their sons are innocent. That's simple psychological denial. The reality is too painful to bear, so you just distort it until it's bearable. We all do that to some extent, and it's a common psychological misjudgment that causes terrible problems.

  Charlie Munger

  Mother, Son, Simple

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• While no real money came down, my family gave me a good education and a marvelous example of how people should behave, and in the end that was more valuable than money. Being surrounded by the right values from the beginning is an immense treasure. Warrenhad that. It even has a financial advantage.

  Charlie Munger

  Real, People, Example

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• We're emphasizing the knowable by predicting how certain people and companies will swim against the current. We're not predicting the fluctuation in the current.

  Charlie Munger

  People, Swim, Insightful

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