Our experience tends to confirm a long-held notion that being prepared, on a few occasions in a lifetime, to act promptly in scale, in doing some simple and logical thing, will often dramatically improve the financial results of that lifetime.

A lot of success in life and business comes from knowing what you want to avoid: early death, a bad marriage, etc.

It would be easier to screw up American Express than Coke or Gillette, but it's an immensely strong business.

I have concluded that most PhD economists under appraise the power of the common-stock-based "wealth effect," under current extreme conditions... "Wealth effects" involve mathematical puzzles that are not nearly so well worked out as physics theories and never can be... What has happened in Japan over roughly the last ten years has shaken up academic economics, as it obviously should, creating strong worries about recession from "wealth effects" in reverse.

If the value of a company doesn't just scream out at you, it's too close.

All the equity investors, in total, will surely bear a performance disadvantage per annum equal to the total croupiers' costs they have jointly elected to bear. This is an inescapable fact of life. And it is also inescapable that exactly half of the investors will get a result below the median result after the croupiers' take, which median result may well be somewhere between unexciting and lousy.

A director who gets $150,000 per year from a company and needs the money is not independent.