“The single most important decision in evaluating a business is pricing power. If you’ve got the power to raise prices without losing business to a competitor, you’ve got a very good business. And if you have to have a prayer session before raising the price by 10 percent, then you’ve got a terrible business.”-said Warren Buffett in an interview with the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission (FCIC)
Category: Quotes
Categories
For my sake, buy buy buy !!
Should you dive into the stock market? Absolutely. And if you have no money to invest, I recommend getting cash advances against your credit cards. And stop eating, entertaining, and saving for your kids’ educations. Sell your blood if you need to. Put all of that extra money in the stock market. My reasoning is simple: I own stocks and I want you to drive up their prices.
I have a feeling that the smart money is already in the market and those folks are crouching like sprinters, waiting for any sign of bad news. Meanwhile, we are way overdue for some sort of bullshit crisis like the Year 2000 bug, or California going into a death spiral, or an artificial debt limit, or North Korea testing a satellite-based death-ray. When the new fake crisis happens, sometime within the next month, the market will pull back 10%. That’s when I expect to go into a panic and start selling my stocks at a loss.
What the stock market needs – and what I need – is for lots of people who know absolutely nothing about investing to pile into the market and buy broad market ETFs. Then I need those people to poke out their own eyes and caulk their ear holes so they don’t accidentally encounter any news. I don’t think that is too much to ask.
–wrote Scott Adams, Creator of Dilbert
Categories
Why investing is like poker
Too many investors are reactive decision makers… if something has gone up, they say ‘ah, that’s a good investment,’ they don’t say ‘that’s more expensive.’ It’s the most common mistake in investing.
The bets are zero sum. In order for you to beat me in the game, it’s like poker, it’s a zero sum game. We have 1,500 people that work at Bridgewater, we spend hundreds of millions of dollars on research, and so on. We’ve been doing this for 37 years and we don’t know that we’re going to win. We have to have diversified bets. So it’s very important for most people to know when not to make a bet. Because if you’re going to come to the poker table, you’re going to have to beat me, and you’re going to have to beat those who take money. So the nature of investing is that a very small percentage of the people take money essentially in that poker game away from other people who don’t know when prices go up whether that means it’s a good investment or if it’s a more expensive investment.-said Ray Dalio
Categories
How hedge funds get their edge
When a former trader from Galleon Group was asked what the word “edge” meant to him, he laughed and said that from the day he started at Galleon to the day he left, it was probably the most commonly used term around the office. It was such a priority, the trader added, that if you didn’t have it, you’d be quickly left behind. It meant that you knew something that others didn’t. Another trader—a witness in the government’s insider-trading investigation—was asked if he knew of any hedge fund that didn’t traffic in illegal information, according to the person familiar with the inquiry: No, the source answered, they would never survive. In this way, trading on nonpublic material information is similar to doping in professional cycling: Once someone like Lance Armstrong starts doing it, everyone else has to as well.
– from BusinessWeek
Categories
The Cindrella Principle
Everyone thinks life is one upward, smooth trajectory. They think of Cinderella in her big castle and forget that she spent decades scrubbing floors, being beaten, and locked in a cold room. Between “Once upon a time” and “Happily ever after” a lot happens. Not all of it is good.-by Joshua Kennon