A prediction about the direction of the stock market tells you nothing about where stocks are headed, but a whole lot about the person doing the predicting.

Can you know you can have institutions that put curbs on that in various ways, and actually what the banks, you know, they have various capital ratios and that sort of thing, but the banks got around them, I mean, they set up sieves and that sort of thing just to get more leverage. People love leverage when it's working. I mean, it's so easy to borrow money from a guy at X and put it out at X.

We try to buy businesses with good-to-superb underlying economics run by honest and able people and buy them at sensible prices. That's all I'm trying to do.

What we really want to do is buy businesses that we would be happy to own forever.

Charlie and I decided long ago that in an investment lifetime, it's too hard to make hundreds of smart decisions. That judgment became ever more compelling as Berkshire's capital mushroomed and the universe of investments that could significantly affect our results shrank dramatically. Therefore, we adopted a strategy that required our being smart and not too smart at that, only a very few times. Indeed, we now settle for one good idea a year.

If you have more than 120 or 130 I.Q. points, you can afford to give the rest away. You don't need extraordinary intelligence to succeed as an investor.

I think you are out of your mind if you keep taking jobs that you don't like because you think it will look good on your resume. Isn't that a little like saving up sex for your old age?