Guy Spier Quotes

One has to divide Warren Buffet into different periods. There is a continuously evolving style of Warren Buffett.

For most people, attaining the intellectual clarity and emotional detachment that investing requires is tough.

Take any person, put them in the wrong environment, and they can get off to some pretty bad things. Warren Buffett has said that he would not like to get into debt because he doesn’t want to discover what behavior he’s capable of.

The trend of the market is up, not down. Shorting stocks puts you against that trend and thus makes it more difficult to make money.

I do not use short selling. The fund has not shorted a stock since the 2002 to 2003 time frame. At that time I did short three stocks, on which I broke even on two and made money on one of them. The experience taught me that I was not going to be using short selling going forward for a slew of reasons.

I learned to see myself and my role as a capitalist… as somebody who’s trying to harness, for myself and for society, the power of greed and the power of the will to acquire into something that makes the world a better place. That’s the version of capitalism that we want.

The entire pursuit of value investing requires you to see where the crowd is wrong so that you can profit from their misperceptions.

Over the time that I followed Warren Buffett, one CFO told me, it’s very important to pay attention not only to what Warren Buffett says and what he actually does – often there are subtle differences between the two.