You could take all the gold that's ever been mined, and it would fill a cube 67 feet in each direction. For what that's worth at current gold prices, you could buy all -- not some -- all of the farmland in the United States. Plus, you could buy 10 Exxon Mobils, plus have $1 trillion of walking-around money. Or you could have a big cube of metal. Which would you take? Which is going to produce more value?
People went crazy with tulip bulbs. They went crazy with the South Sea Bubble, they went crazy internet stocks, they went crazy with the uranium stocks back when I was first getting started.
The active investors will have their returns diminished by a far greater percentage than will their inactive brethren. That means that the passive group - the "know-nothings" - must win.
But 300 million Americans, their lending institutions, their government, their media, all believed that house prices were going to go up consistently. And that got billed into a $20 trillion residential home market. Lending was done based on it, and everybody did a lot of foolish things.
Working with people who cause your stomach to churn seems much like marrying for money - probably a bad idea under any circumstances, but absolute madness if you are already rich.
I don't know that I could draw one that's perfect. But I'd rather by approximately right than precisely wrong, and it would be precisely wrong to turn it down.
Success in investing doesn’t correlate with I.Q. Once you are above the level of 25; once you have ordinary intelligence, what you need is the temperament to control the urges that get other people into trouble in investing.
I don't have my diploma from the University of Nebraska hanging on my office wall, and I don't have my diploma from Columbia up there either-but I do have my Dale Carnegie graduation certificate proudly displayed.
We will continue to ignore political and economic forecasts, which are an expensive distraction for many investors and
businessmen. Thirty years ago, no one could have foreseen the huge expansion of the Vietnam War, wage and price controls, two oil shocks, the resignation of a president, the dissolution of the Soviet Union, a one-day drop in the Dow of 508 points, or treasury bill yields fluctuating between 2.8% and 17.4%.