10 More Thoughts on Investing from Charlie Munger

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Jan 08, 2012
Again thanks to http://www.santangelsreview.com/. It never fails to amaze me how reading a list of quotes from Munger or Buffett is always more useful to me than the last 300 page investing book I’ve read.


· "Organized common (or uncommon) sense is an enormously powerful tool. There are huge dangers with computers. People calculate too much and think too little."


· "Almost all good businesses engage in 'pain today, gain tomorrow' activities."


· "If you buy something because it's undervalued, then you have to think about selling it when it approaches your calculation of its intrinsic value. That's hard. But if you buy a few great companies, then you can sit on your $%@. That's a good thing."


· "A lot of people with high IQs are terrible investors because they've got terrible temperaments. And that is why we say that having a certain kind of temperament is more important than brains. You need to keep raw irrational emotion under control. You need patience and discipline and an ability to take losses and adversity without going crazy. You need an ability to not be driven crazy by extreme success."


· "There 's no way that you can live an adequate life without [making] many mistakes."


· "In investment management today, everybody wants not only to win, but to have a yearly outcome path that never diverges very much from a standard path except on the upside. Well, that is a very artificial, crazy construct. That's the equivalent in investment management to the custom of binding the feet of Chinese women."



· "Life in part is like a poker game, wherein you have to learn to quit sometimes when holding a much loved hand."


· "Some people seem to think there's no trouble just because it hasn't happened yet. If you jump out the window at the 42nd floor and you're still doing fine as you pass the 27th floor, that doesn't mean you don't have a serious problem."


· "In my whole life, I have known no wise people (over a broad subject matter area) who didn't read all the time - none, zero. You'd be amazed at how much Warren reads - at how much I read. My children laugh at me. They think I'm a book with a couple of legs sticking out."


· "Any year that passes in which you don't destroy one of your best loved ideas is a wasted year."



· "The whole concept of dividing it up into 'value' and 'growth' strikes me as twaddle. It's convenient for a bunch of pension fund consultants to get fees prattling about and a way for one adviser to distinguish himself from another. But, to me, all intelligent investing is value investing."