Category: Quotes

“Outsized returns often come from betting against conventional wisdom, and conventional wisdom is usually right.

Given a 10 percent chance of a 100 times payoff, you should take that bet every time.

But you’re still going to be wrong nine times out of ten … We all know that if you swing for the fences, you’re going to strike out a lot, but you’re also going to hit some home runs.

The difference between baseball and business, however, is that baseball has a truncated outcome distribution. When you swing, no matter how well you connect with the ball, the most runs you can get is four. In business, every once in a while, when you step up to the plate, you can score 1,000 runs.

This long-tailed distribution of returns is why it’s important to be bold. Big winners pay for so many experiments.”

-Jeff Bezos

Hat Tip : HA

Source : WhatsApp Forward

There is no precise metric to look at. The smaller a company, the more critical the CEO is. If a company becomes 1000 and 10’000 people, the relative importance of the CEO begins to diminish and the value of the team grows.

I once told a room of 200 professional investors at an investment conference in Omaha that I would give twenty bucks to anyone in the room that could name four CEOs of Exxon after John D. Rockefeller. Nobody could step up to collect the money.

– Tom Gayner

Source: Berkshire 2025 AGM

It’s one thing we’ve really never talked about here, but I spend more time looking at balance sheets than I do income statements. Wall Street doesn’t pay much attention to balance sheets, but I like to look at balance sheets over an 8 or 10 year period before I even look at the income account because there are certain things it’s harder to hide or play games with on the balance sheet than with the income statement.

Neither one gives you the total answer on anything, but you should understand what the figures are saying and what they don’t say and what they can’t say and what the management would like them to say that the auditors wouldn’t like them to say. You learn more from balance sheets in my view than most people give them credit for

-Warren Buffett