Frases de Warren Buffett

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“No puedes hacer un buen trato con una mala persona.”

“Las cadenas del hábito son demasiado ligeras para sentirse hasta que son demasiado pesadas para romperse.”

“Si has estado jugando póker durante media hora y aún no sabes quién es el idiota, tú eres el idiota.”

“Cuando combina ignorancia y apalancamiento, obtiene resultados bastante interesantes.”

“El riesgo proviene de no saber lo que estás haciendo.”

“No intente predecir la dirección del mercado de valores, la economía, los tipos de interés o las elecciones.”

“Si no puede ver caer un 50% de su inversión sin pánico, no invierta en el mercado de valores.”

“Nunca cuente con hacer una buena venta.”

“Mientras más absurdo sea el comportamiento del mercado, mejor será la oportunidad para el inversor metódico.”

“Busque compañías con gran capacidad de generación de efectivo y que, una vez en marcha, no necesiten grandes reinversiones.”

“También son interesantes algunas compañías con marcas consolidadas pero que están infravaloradas por dificultades transitorias. Para buscar estas oportunidades, deben aprovecharse los mercados bajistas.”

“Busque empresas con mercados amplios, fuerte imagen de marca y consumidores fieles, como Gillete o Coca Cola.”

“Compre un negocio, no alquile las acciones.”

“Invierta siempre a largo plazo.”

“Céntrese en el retorno de la inversión (no en las ganancias por acción), el nivel de endeudamiento y los márgenes de beneficio.”

“Un inversor necesita hacer muy pocas cosas bien si evita grandes errores. No es necesario hacer algo extraordinario para conseguir resultados excelentes.”

“Gran parte de éxito puede atribuirse a la inactividad. La mayoría de los inversores no resiste la tentación de comprar y vender constantemente, pero la piedra angular debe ser el letargo, bordeando la pereza.”

“El optimismo es el enemigo del comprador racional.”

“Sea temeroso cuando otros son codiciosos y viceversa.”

“Compre compañías con buen historial de beneficios y posición dominante de mercado.”

“La vida es como una bola de nieve. Lo importante es encontrar nieve húmeda y una colina muy larga.”

“Compre un negocio, no alquile acciones.”

“Our stay-put behavior reflects our view that the stock market serves as a relocation center at which money is moved from the active to the patient.”

“The most common cause of low prices is pessimism — some times pervasive, some times specific to a company or industry. We want to do business in such an environment, not because we like pessimism but because we like the prices it produces. It's optimism that is the enemy of the rational buyer.”

“You couldn't advance in a finance department in this country unless you taught that the world was flat.”

“Most companies are saddled with institutional constraints. A company's history, for example, may commit it to an industry that now offers limited opportunity. A more common problem is a shareholder constituency that pressures its manager to dance to Wall Street's tune. Many CEOs resist, but others give in and adopt operating and capital-allocation policies far different from those they would choose if left to themselves.”

“Ben's Mr. Market allegory may seem out-of-date in today's investment world, in which most professionals and academicians talk of efficient markets, dynamic hedging and betas. Their interest in such matters is understandable, since techniques shrouded in mystery clearly have value to the purveyor of investment advice. After all, what witch doctor has ever achieved fame and fortune by simply advising "Take two aspirins?"”

“Instead, we try to apply Aesop's 2,600-year-old equation to opportunities in which we have reasonable confidence as to how many birds are in the bush and when they will emerge (a formulation that my grandsons would probably update to "A girl in a convertible is worth five in the phonebook.").”

“It's class warfare. My class is winning, but they shouldn't be.”

“Our performance, relatively, is likely to be better in a bear market than in a bull market … in a year when the general market had a substantial advance, I would be well satisfied to match the advance of the averages.”

“The line separating investment and speculation, which is never bright and clear, becomes blurred still further when most market participants have recently enjoyed triumphs. Nothing sedates rationality like large doses of effortless money. After a heady experience of that kind, normally sensible people drift into behavior akin to that of Cinderella at the ball. They know that overstaying the festivities—that is, continuing to speculate in companies that have gigantic valuations relative to the cash they are likely to generate in the future—will eventually bring on pumpkins and mice. But they nevertheless hate to miss a single minute of what is one helluva party. Therefore, the giddy participants all plan to leave just seconds before midnight. There's a problem, though: They are dancing in a room in which the clocks have no hands.”

“Long ago, Sir Isaac Newton gave us three laws of motion, which were the work of genius. But Sir Isaac's talents didn't extend to investing: He lost a bundle in the South Sea Bubble, explaining later, "I can calculate the movement of the stars, but not the madness of men." If he had not been traumatized by this loss, Sir Isaac might well have gone on to discover the Fourth Law of Motion: For investors as a whole, returns decrease as motion increases.”

“We have tried occasionally to buy toads at bargain prices with results that have been chronicled in past reports. Clearly our kisses fell flat. We have done well with a couple of princes — but they were princes when purchased. At least our kisses didn’t turn them into toads. And, finally, we have occasionally been quite successful in purchasing fractional interests in easily-identifiable princes at toad-like prices.”

“In fact, when we own portions of outstanding businesses with outstanding managements, our favorite holding period is forever.”

“We don't get paid for activity, just for being right. As to how long we'll wait, we'll wait indefinitely.”

“Investors should remember that excitement and expenses are their enemies. And if they insist on trying to time their participation in equities, they should try to be fearful when others are greedy and greedy only when others are fearful.”

“We will reject interesting opportunities rather than over-leverage our balance sheet.”

“Putting people into homes, though a desirable goal, shouldn’t be our country’s primary objective. Keeping them in their homes should be the ambition.”

“I try to buy stock in businesses that are so wonderful that an idiot can run them. Because sooner or later, one will.”

“Investors making purchases in an overheated market need to recognize that it may often take an extended period for the value of even an outstanding company to catch up with the price they paid.”

“For example: (1) As if governed by Newton's First Law of Motion, an institution will resist any change in its current direction; (2) Just as work expands to fill available time, corporate projects or acquisitions will materialize to soak up available funds; (3) Any business craving of the leader, however foolish, will be quickly supported by detailed rate-of-return and strategic studies prepared by his troops; and (4) The behavior of peer companies, whether they are expanding, acquiring, setting executive compensation or whatever, will be mindlessly imitated.”

“Intrinsic value can be defined simply: It is the discounted value of the cash that can be taken out of a business during its remaining life. The calculation of intrinsic value, though, is not so simple. As our definition suggests, intrinsic value is an estimate rather than a precise figure, and it is additionally an estimate that must be changed if interest rates move or forecasts of future cash flows are revised.”

“Of course, Charlie and I can identify only a few Inevitables, even after a lifetime of looking for them. Leadership alone provides no certainties: Witness the shocks some years back at General Motors, IBM and Sears, all of which had enjoyed long periods of seeming invincibility. Though some industries or lines of business exhibit characteristics that endow leaders with virtually insurmountable advantages, and that tend to establish Survival of the Fattest as almost a natural law, most do not. Thus, for every Inevitable, there are dozens of Impostors, companies now riding high but vulnerable to competitive attacks.”

“The best thing that happens to us is when a great company gets into temporary trouble… We want to buy them when they're on the operating table.”

“I like to study failure, actually. My partner says, "I want to know where I'll die so I'll never go there." We want to see what has caused businesses to go bad. The biggest thing that kills them is complacency…. The danger would always be that you rest on your laurels.”

“Over the years, Charlie [Munger, Berkshire Hathaway Vice Chairman] and I have observed many accounting-based frauds of staggering size. Few of the perpetrators have been punished; many have not even been censured. It has been far safer to steal large sums with pen than small sums with a gun.”

“What counts for most people in investing is not how much they know, but rather how realistically they define what they don't know.”

“An irresistible footnote: in 1971, pension fund managers invested a record 122% of net funds available in equities — at full prices they couldn't buy enough of them. In 1974, after the bottom had fallen out, they committed a then record low of 21% to stocks.”

“We're going to move a lot of crude (oil) in this country, and we have to learn how to do it very safely.”

“But now for the final exam: If you expect to be a net saver during the next five years, should you hope for a higher or lower stock market during that period? Many investors get this one wrong. Even though they are going to be net buyers of stocks for many years to come, they are elated when stock prices rise and depressed when they fall. In effect, they rejoice because prices have risen for the "hamburgers" they will soon be buying. This reaction makes no sense. Only those who will be sellers of equities in the near future should be happy at seeing stocks rise. Prospective purchasers should much prefer sinking prices.”

“If you invested in a very low cost index fund — where you don’t put the money in at one time, but average in over 10 years — you’ll do better than 90% of people who start investing at the same time.”