Investors... can't pick stocks that are better than average. Stocks are a good thing to own over time. There's only two things you can do wrong: You can buy the wrong ones, and you can buy or sell them at the wrong time. And the truth is you never need to sell them.
I do not like debt and do not like to invest in companies that have too much debt, particularly long-term debt. With long-term debt, increases in interest rates can drastically affect company profits and make future cash flows less predictable.
The latter qualification brings to mind a fellow who applied for a job and stated he had twenty years of experience-which was corrected by a former employer to read "one year's experience-twenty times.
Of the billionaires I have known, money just brings out the basic traits in them. If they were jerks before they had money, they are simply jerks with a billion dollars.
The only way to get love is to be lovable. It's very irritating if you have a lot of money. You'd like to think you could write a check: "I'll buy a million dollars' worth of love." But it doesn't work that way. The more you give love away, the more you get.
Well, I think the biggest mistake is not learning the habits of saving properly early. Because saving is a habit. And then, trying to get rich quick. It's pretty easy to get well-to-do slowly. But it's not easy to get rich quick.
If I were the treasury secretary or head of the Fed, you know, I would try to scare the hell the out of the private sector and say, you better save this because you're going down with the ship.