The reaction of weak management to weak operations is often weak accounting.

I mean, they were getting the mortgage of some guy in Omaha, you know, securitized a couple of times. I mean he had all these - they had all these types from Wall Street, you know, and they had advanced degrees, and they look very alert, and they came with these - they came with these things that said gamma and alpha and sigma and all that. And all I can say is beware of geeks, you know, bearing formulas. They've heard that in Europe.

The worst sort of business is one that grows rapidly, requires significant capital to engender the growth, and then earns little or no money. Think airlines. Here a durable competitive advantage has proven elusive ever since the days of the Wright Brothers. Indeed, if a farsighted capitalist had been present at Kitty Hawk, he would have done his successors a huge favor by shooting Orville down.

I don't have my diploma from the University of Nebraska hanging on my office wall, and I don't have my diploma from Columbia up there either-but I do have my Dale Carnegie graduation certificate proudly displayed.

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

There are three important principles to Graham's approach. [The first is to look at stocks as fractional shares of a business, which] gives you an entirely different view than most people who are in the market. [The second principle is the margin-of-safety concept, which] gives you the competitive advantage. [The third is having a true investor's attitude toward the stock market, which] if you have that attitude, you start out ahead of 99 percent of all the people who are operating in the stock market - it's an enormous advantage.

Never count on making a good sale. Have the purchase price be so attractive that even a mediocre sale gives good results.