You should be unconcerned about short-term price action when you own the securities directly, just as you were unconcerned when you owned them indirectly through BPL. I think about them as businesses, not "stocks", and if the business does all right over the long term, so will the stock.

The dominant factors affecting control valuations are earning power (past and prospective) and asset values.

The range of derivatives contracts is limited only by the imagination of man (or sometimes, so it seems, madmen). Say you want to write a contract speculating on the number of twins to be born in Nebraska in 2020. No problem-at a price, you will easily find an obliging counterparty.

Honesty is a very expensive gift, Don't expect it from cheap people.

Failing conventionally is the route to go; as a group, lemmings may have a rotten image, but no individual lemming has ever received bad press

Investors... can't pick stocks that are better than average. Stocks are a good thing to own over time. There's only two things you can do wrong: You can buy the wrong ones, and you can buy or sell them at the wrong time. And the truth is you never need to sell them.

The stock market is a wonderfully efficient mechanism for transferring wealth from the impatient to the patient.