Practical investors usually learn their problem is finding enough outstanding investments, rather than choosing among too many.

The successful investor is usually an individual who is inherently interested in business problems.

Even in those earlier times, finding the really outstanding companies and staying with them through all the fluctuations of a gyrating market proved far more profitable to far more people than did the more colorful practice of trying to buy them cheap and sell them dear.

The stock market is filled with individuals who know the price of everything, but the value of nothing.

Of one thing the investor can be certain: A large company's need to bring in a new chief executive from the outside is a damning sign of something basically wrong with the existing management - no matter how good the surface signs may have been as indicated by the most recent earnings statement.

If the growth rate is so good that in another ten years the company might well have quadrupled, is it really of such great concern whether at the moment the stock might or might not be 35% overpriced?

My mistake was to project my skill beyond the limits of experience. I began investing outside the industries which I believe I thoroughly understood, in completely different spheres of activity; situations where I did not have comparable background knowledge.