If you gave me the choice of being CEO of General Electric or IBM or General Motors, you name it, or delivering papers, I would deliver papers. I would. I enjoyed doing that. I can think about what I want to think. I don't have to do anything I don't want to do.
Take the probability of loss times the amount of possible loss from the probability of gain times the amount of possible gain. That is what we're trying to do. It's imperfect, but that's what it's all about.
If you want your business to survive for 100 years, you've got to make it through every single day for 100 years. It's not enough to do it 99.9% of the time.
I've learned mainly by reading myself. So I don't think I have any original ideas. Certainly, I talk about reading Graham. I've read Phil Fisher. So I've gotten a lot of my ideas from reading. You can learn a lot from other people. In fact, I think if you learn basically from other people, you don't have to get too many new ideas on your own. You can just apply the best of what you see.
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.
It's a nightmare to administer some of this sort of thing, but I want to tell the shareholders of Berkshire, to the percent we own marketable securities or things for which there are market, even if those markets - I want to tell them what it's all about.
The major asset in this category is gold, currently a huge favorite of investors who fear almost all other assets, especially paper money (of whose value, as noted, they are right to be fearful). Gold, however, has two significant shortcomings, being neither of much use nor procreative. True, gold has some industrial and decorative utility, but the demand for these purposes is both limited and incapable of soaking up new production. Meanwhile, if you own one ounce of gold for an eternity, you will still own one ounce at its end.
A prediction about the direction of the stock market tells you nothing about where stocks are headed, but a whole lot about the person doing the predicting.
The best way in my view is to just buy a low-cost index fund and keep buying it regularly over time, because you'll be buying into a wonderful industry, which in effect is all of American industry... People ought to sit back and relax and keep accumulating over time.
So some guy may know how to make money in cocoa beans, but I don't so I just let him have that. But it's got to be something I understand. It's got to be a business with fundamentally good economics. It's got to be a management that I like and trust and admire. And it's got to be a price that makes sense.
The secret is to find what you love to do.I mean, I tell the students look for the job that you would take if you didn't need a job. I mean, it's that simple. And I was lucky enough to find it very early in life. And then the second thing is to have people around you that make feel good every day, and make you a better person than you otherwise would be.
I have no idea on timing. It’s easier to tell what will happen than when it will happen. I would say that what is going on in terms of trade policy is going to have very important consequences.