I bought my first stock in 1942, in the summer of '42. I was 11 years old. And so 75 years have gone by. And I have never known what the market's going to do the next day. And that's not my game. My game is to decide whether I'm in the right economy, which America's definitely been ever since that time. The Dow has gone from 100 to 21,000 during that time. And no matter what the headlines say, or terrible things are happening - we were losing the war in the Pacific when I first bought stocks.
The great personal fortunes in the country weren't built on a portfolio of fifty companies. They were built by someone who identified one wonderful business. With each investment you make, you should have the courage and the conviction to place at least 10% of your net worth in that stock.
The only question is whether you’re going to do it today or tomorrow. If you keep saying you’re going to do it tomorrow,
you’ll never do it. You have to get on it today.
I mean, if Pearl Harbor came along, you could have said the planning was wrong by the military ahead of time or maybe the battleships shouldn't have all been in the harbor and all that kind of thing.
They say the chains of habit are too light to be felt until they are too heavy to be broken. The chains you put around yourself now have enormous consequences as you go through life.
The real fortunes in this country have been made by people who have been right about the business they invested in, and not right about the timing of the stock market.