Value investment - Buffett - Price concious

Value investor- Warren Buffett
Price concious:

- Price is what you pay. Value is what you get.
- For some reason, people take their cues from price action rather than from values. What doesn't work is when you start doing things that you don't understand or because they worked last week for somebody else. The dumbest reason in the world to buy a stock is because it's going up.
- Most people get interested in stocks when everyone else is. The time to get interested is when no one else is. You can't buy what is popular and do well.
- We have tried occasionally to buy toads at bargain prices with results that have been chronicled in past reports. Clearly our kisses fell flat. We have done well with a couple of princes - but they were princes when purchased. At least our kisses didn't turn them into toads. And, finally, we have occasionally been quite successful in purchasing fractional interests in easily-identifiable princes at toad-like prices.
- 1981 Chairman's Letters to Shareholders
- Never count on making a good sale. Have the purchase price be so attractive that even a mediocre sale gives good results.
- 1974 Letter to Shareholders
- Investors making purchases in an overheated market need to recognize that it may often take an extended period for the value of even an outstanding company to catch up with the price they paid.
- Berkshire Hathaway 1998 Annual Meeting
- If you're an investor, you're looking on what the asset is going to do, if you're a speculator, you're commonly focusing on what the price of the object is going to do, and that's not our game.
(1997 Berkshire Hathaway Annual Meeting )
- Despite three years of falling prices, which have significantly improved the attractiveness of common stocks, we still find very few that even mildly interest us. That dismal fact is testimony to the insanity of valuations reached during The Great Bubble. Unfortunately, the hangover may prove to be proportional to the binge.
March 2003
- On acquiring bad companies for cheap prices: "In my early days as a manager I, too, dated a few toads. They were cheap dates - I've never been much of a sport - but my results matched those of acquirers who courted higher-price toads. I kissed and they croaked."
- I like to go for cinches. I like to shoot fish in a barrel. But I like to do it after the water has run out.
(October 2003 talking with Wharton MBA students)
- The important thing is to keep playing, to play against weak opponents and to play for big stakes.
( November 2002 talking with students at Gaston Hall )

Value investment news/book