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.
If you invested in a very low cost index fund - where you don't put the money in at one time, but average in over 10 years -you'll do better than 90% of people who start investing at the same time.
Buy a cross section of American industry, and if a cross section of American industry doesn't work, certainly trying to pick the little beauties here and there isn't going to work either.
The problem with commodities is that you are betting on what someone else would pay for them in six months. The commodity itself isn't going to do anything for you....it is an entirely different game to buy a lump of something and hope that somebody else pays you more for that lump two years from now than it is to buy something that you expect to produce income for you over time.
A lot of great fortunes in the world have been made by owning a single wonderful business. If you understand the business, you don't need to own very many of them.
We want to use cash. The reason we haven't used our cash two years ago, we just didn't find things that were that attractive. But when people talk about cash being king, it's not king if it just sits there and never does anything. There are times when cash buys more than other times, and this is one of the other times when it buys a fair amount more, so we use it.
I think the biggest thing we need is to unclog the credit markets, and we may need another stimulus - if we do, it's - it should go to the lower and middle-income people.
I mean you know at midnight everything is going to turn to pumpkins and mice; right? But if the evening goes along, I mean, you know, the guys look better all the time, the music sounds better, it's more and more fun, you think why the hell should I leave at quarter of 12. I'll leave at two minutes to 12. But the trouble is, there are no clocks on the wall. And everybody thinks they're going to leave at two minutes to 12.