If the investor is uneducated, anything he or she invests in will be risky. So it's not the investment that is risky. It's the investor.
At SGI board meetings. . . Jim Clark's face would get red and he'd start shouting that an investor and board member had cheated him and his engineers.
Only in the exceptional case, where the integrity and competence of the advisers have been thoroughly demonstrated, should the investor act upon the advice of others without understanding and approving the decision made.
It is only by understanding the emotion of others that an investor has a chance to produce superior results.
Smart tech investor thinks about: a) future product roadmap, b) bottoms-up market size & growth, c) talent and skill of team. Essentially you are valuing things that have not yet happened, and the likelihood of the CEO and team being able to make them happen. Finance people find this appalling, but investors who do this well can make a lot of money.
Whenever the investor sold out in an upswing as soon as the top level of the previous well-recognized bull market was reached, he had a chance in the next bear market to buy back at one third (or better) below his selling price.
I figured maybe I had some talent as an investor… since it seemed like I was only a half-assed entrepreneur.
It’s waiting that helps you as an investor, and a lot of people just can’t stand to wait. If you didn’t get the deferred-gratification gene, you’ve got to work very hard to overcome that.
To be a successful business owner and investor, you have to be emotionally neutral to winning and losing. Winning and losing are just part of the game.
The speculator is not an investor.
The best investor is your customer.
If the world couldn't see your results, would you rather be thought of as the world's greatest investor but in reality have the world's worst record? Or be thought of as the world's worst investor when you were actually the best?
The successful investor is usually an individual who is inherently interested in business problems.
I am truly an angel investor and I'am not a passive investor. As a passive investor, I am awful because I can not put funding into a company and leave it to other people.
As an investor I cannot tell that. We cannot predict the success or failure.
The market is a pendulum that forever swings between unsustainable optimism (which makes stocks too expensive) and unjustified pessimism (which makes them too cheap). The intelligent investor is a realist who sells to optimists and buys from pessimists.
Independent thinking is not just helpful in becoming a successful investor, it’s required.
To be an investor you must be a believer in a better tomorrow.
The sillier the market's behavior, the greater the opportunity for the business like investor.
There are all kinds of businesses that Charlie and I don't understand, but that doesn't cause us to stay up at night. It just means we go on to the next one, and that's what the individual investor should do.