It's not supposed to be easy. Anyone who finds it easy is stupid.
Investing without research is like playing stud poker and never looking at the cards.
The investor's chief problem — and his worst enemy — is likely to be himself.
Risk management is not about avoiding risk. It's about understanding it.
The market has a tendency to go to extremes in both directions. Your job is to profit from that tendency, not participate in it.
Successful investing requires patience, discipline, and a tolerance for uncertainty. It also helps to have a sense of humor.
If you can hold on during the bad years — and there will be bad years — the Magic Formula works. If you can't, you will sell at the bottom and miss everything.
Winning in markets over the long run requires relentless intellectual honesty. You have to be willing to be wrong, learn from it, and update.
Markets are brutal. They do not care about your feelings. They care about whether your analysis is right.
We don't override the models. When you start doing that, you have a problem. The model is built on evidence. Your gut is built on stories.
I don't have an opinion on the stock market. I have rules. My rules tell me what to buy and when. My opinion tells me nothing useful.
The number one rule is: cut your losses short. Everything else is secondary. If you can do that one thing, you can survive long enough to get good.
I look for a 5:1 reward-to-risk ratio. If I think I can make five dollars for every one dollar I risk, I will take the trade. If not, I pass.
Know your risk before you enter the trade. Not after. After is too late.
Most traders fail because they don't have a daily max loss limit. The moment you remove that guardrail, one bad day can erase months of progress.
The goal is not to be right. The goal is to make money when you are right and lose a little when you are wrong. The math is simple. Execution is hard.
Investing is not about being smarter than everyone else. It is about having a framework and sticking to it when it is uncomfortable.
In a bull market, everyone is a genius. In a bear market, you find out who actually knows what they are doing.
Dollar cost averaging is boring. It is also one of the best strategies for most people.
The temporary satisfaction of quitting is outweighed by the eternal suffering of mediocrity.
If you want to be successful, you have to be willing to be uncomfortable every single day.
The difference between successful people and unsuccessful people is that successful people do all the things unsuccessful people don't want to do.
Everyone has got the will to win. It's only those with the will to prepare that do win.
It's not what we do once in a while that shapes our lives. It's what we do consistently.
Bulls make money, bears make money, pigs get slaughtered.
Automate your finances. If you have to remember to save, you won't.
The only way you will ever permanently take control of your financial life is to dig deep and fix the root problem.
A budget doesn't limit your freedom. It gives you freedom.
You don't have to be rich to be financially secure. You have to be consistent.
The difference between people who make it financially and those who don't isn't income. It's habits.
Patience isn't passive. It's the active decision to wait for the right opportunity instead of settling for a mediocre one.
Good investing is not about making good decisions. It's about consistently not screwing up.
If you can't build a simple model for why a stock is worth buying, you're gambling, not investing.
Rule number one: don't lose money. Rule number two: don't forget rule number one.
Fear and greed are the two biggest enemies of the investor. Learn to use them instead of being used by them.
The most important quality for an investor is temperament, not intellect.
The best investment you can make is in your own physical health. Everything else follows from that.
How you wake up each day dramatically affects how you live each day.
A good financial plan is one you can actually follow when things get scary. Most plans fail that test.
Stop trying to be perfect with your money. Good enough, done consistently, beats perfect every time.
Patience isn't passive. It's the active decision to do nothing when doing something would be a mistake.
A cheap stock is not the same as a good investment. That distinction is everything.
Never risk more than 2% of your portfolio on a single trade. That rule has saved me more than any stock pick.
Most people don't fail because of the market. They fail because of their own emotions.
The best investment strategy is the one you can actually stick with for 20 years.
Eat that frog. Do the hardest, most important thing first every morning.
Profitability isn't something we discovered recently. We've been profitable since 2017. We just didn't make it our personality.
We were profitable before we took a dollar of venture capital. SoftBank didn't save us — they accelerated us. That's the only reason to take outside money.
We will not invest in dot-com companies that have no earnings, no clear path to earnings, and valuations that make no rational sense to us.
Sticking to a strategy through a drawdown is the hardest thing in investing. Anyone can be disciplined when things are working. The test is whether you stay when everything you believe is being punished by the market.
The discipline isn't getting into a trade. It's getting out of the one that isn't working.
We were profitable before we went public. That wasn't an accident. We don't believe in growing at all costs.
We hit profitability in France before expanding. That was intentional. We didn't want to be another neobank burning cash in five countries at once. Profitable in one, then expand. Old school. It works.
When the market crashed, we cut costs, shut down Shopee in France and India, and focused on profitability. Q4 2022 — first profitable quarter. Sometimes the best growth strategy is knowing when to stop growing.
In the stock market, the money you don't lose is more important than the money you make. Avoiding stupidity is the whole game.
Delay gratification. The most important ability is to resist short-term temptation for long-term reward. This applies to companies, careers, and life.
I wake up at 4 AM every day. Not because I have to — because I want to. The world is quietest at 4 AM, and that's when the best thinking happens.
I saved $100,000 by age 25 on a nonprofit salary. Not because I'm a genius — because I had a system. Automate your savings, invest consistently, and stop buying things you don't care about to impress people you don't like.
Lifestyle inflation is the silent killer of wealth. Every raise you get is a test of your discipline.
Tennis taught me that preparation wins. In investing, diligence is preparation. You do the work before you write the check.
Most investors fail because they confuse activity with progress. The fewer decisions you make, the better each one tends to be.
The best time to buy is when everyone else is selling in panic. The worst time to buy is when everyone else is buying in euphoria. This is obvious and almost nobody does it.
If you cannot write down on a piece of paper why you own a stock you should not own it.
Most macro commentators confuse what they want to happen with what is actually going to happen. Those are two very different things.
The hardest part of value investing is holding on when the market disagrees with you for years at a time.
If you cannot stomach a 50 percent decline in your investment you should not be in equities.
We bootstrapped for six years before raising venture capital. We wanted to make sure the product worked before scaling it.
I read every 10-K of every company I own. If that sounds boring to you then investing is not your game.
We cut thousands of jobs and exited markets. It was painful but necessary. Growth without discipline is suicide.
Profitability is not optional in India. Investors will not subsidize you forever. We were profitable before IPO and proud of it.
My banking career taught me one thing above all: cash flow is not a metric. It is oxygen.
The most dangerous phrase in investing is 'this time is different.' It is never different. Only the details change.
If the data says stop, stop. We killed iBuying because the data told us to, not because we wanted to.
We hit a 5 billion dollar valuation before I turned 23. The number means nothing if we cannot turn it into a real business.
We spent 3.5 billion on an electric car and then killed it. The car worked beautifully. The economics did not.
We exited 14 countries. That is 14 painful decisions. But focus requires saying no more often than yes.
Knowing when to stop is the hardest thing in finance. Everyone wants one more year. One more trade. I chose to stop.
We expanded to 9 countries. We should have stayed in 3. Speed of expansion killed us not the concept.
I wake up at 4 AM. I write before the markets open. Discipline is the only edge that compounds.
The day I got my check I spent a million dollars. My financial advisor said you will go broke. I said no I won't. And then I learned about compound interest.
Every investment should have a thesis and a timeline. If it's not working, cut it.
The edge isn't in being smart. It's in being disciplined about expected value.
The advantage of a mathematical approach is that it removes human emotion from the equation.
I test every strategy against the data before putting a dollar behind it. If it doesn't work across 80 years, I don't use it.
When stock prices are high, use shares as currency. When prices are low, buy shares back. It's arithmetic, not genius.
Don't get emotionally attached to any asset. Everything I own is for sale at the right price.
Profitability requires discipline. We laid off thousands and cut spending. It was painful but necessary.
We pulled back from some markets to focus on profitability. Discipline over growth. Hard lesson learned.
I wear the same black suit every day because decisions about what to wear are decisions I don't need to make.
I reinvest everything. I haven't taken a salary. Every penny goes back into making better videos.
I study financial statements the way I used to study pitchers — obsessively.
I still fly economy class. Saving money is not about poverty — it's about discipline.
I read for 14 hours a day. I'm not smarter than other investors. I just read more.
I don't do 50 deals a year. I do 5. But I go deep on every single one.
One losing month in ten years. People call it luck. I call it 10,000 trades where the math worked.
Position sizing is the most underrated skill in investing. It's not what you own — it's how much.
I don't predict. I react. The models follow the data, not my opinions.
I don't have opinions about where markets are going. I have models that tell me where the probabilities favor being.
The diet changed everything. I went from top ten to number one because I changed what I ate. That's it.
There may be people who have more talent than you, but there is no excuse for anyone to work harder than you.
I gave up alcohol. I changed my diet completely. The results on the field were immediate. Discipline is the ultimate performance enhancer.
Risk management matters more than return generation. If you control the downside, the upside takes care of itself.
Profitability is not a destination. It is a discipline. We got there by cutting what didn't work and doubling down on what did.
The hardest part of investing is doing nothing. The second hardest part is doing nothing when everyone else is panicking.
The Netherlands is a small market. But building there first taught me discipline that American startups never learn.
Eight gold medals across three Olympics. That kind of dominance teaches you that preparation is everything — in sports and in business.
The best insurance decisions I have ever made are the risks I declined to write. Saying no is the most underrated skill in underwriting.
Warren has always said — and I agree — that the most important thing in insurance is not growth. It is discipline. One bad year of poor underwriting can erase a decade of profits.
In cricket and in business, the result matters. But the process that gets you to the result matters more. Get the process right and the result takes care of itself.
Health is the ultimate investment. Everything else you build depends on it. I have never met a successful person who neglected their body long-term and got away with it.
You must work very hard to become a natural golfer.
I started with nothing and built something. That is not luck. That is discipline, repeated every single day for thirty years.
Everyone wants to find the next great manager. The real skill is knowing when to leave the current one.
I'd rather take a big loss on a trade I understood than a small loss on one I didn't.
The army taught me one thing that Harvard didn't — how to make decisions when you don't have all the information and the consequences are real.
Discipline beats talent. I've seen brilliant traders blow up because they couldn't follow their own rules when it mattered.
The best time to sell is when everyone wants to buy from you. That's a lesson most founders learn too late.
A great idea with a bad process will fail every time. A great process will eventually find great ideas on its own.
Selling a business you built is harder than building it. But knowing when to sell is the most important skill a founder can have.
The hardest decision in this business isn't when to invest. It's when to stop.
Read the filings. Every answer is in the filings. Most people just can't be bothered to look.
The secret to surviving 40 years in this business is not being the smartest person in the room. It's being the most disciplined.
Leverage is a tool that makes smart people feel invincible right up until the moment it destroys them.
You have to be willing to make mistakes regularly. The trick is to make small mistakes and ride big winners.
You make your money by analyzing the probability and the payoff. If the math is right, the outcome takes care of itself.
Position sizing is everything. Being right on direction means nothing if you’re sized wrong.
Swimming taught me that you can train harder than everyone else and still lose. Markets are the same. Effort is necessary but not sufficient.
My first trade taught me everything. I made money, held on for more, and lost it all. Every trading lesson I know fits in that one story.
Ed Seykota taught me that it’s okay to be wrong, but it’s not okay to stay wrong.
I’d rather miss a move than get caught in a bad one. There’s always another trade.
Consistency is the hardest thing in investing. Anyone can have a great year. Having no losing years requires a completely different approach.
We buy assets. We don’t buy stories. If the asset is worth more than the price, we don’t need a narrative.
The best investments are the ones that make you slightly uncomfortable. Comfort means the price is too high.
Patience in distressed investing isn’t a virtue. It’s a requirement. The assets tell you when they’re ready.
The trend is your friend until it isn’t. The system tells you when it isn’t. Your emotions don’t.
Small funds force discipline. You can’t hide bad bets behind 50 portfolio companies when you only have 15.
I write investment frameworks because writing forces clarity. If I can’t explain why I’m investing, I shouldn’t invest.
Spend less than you earn. Reinvest profits. Grow at a pace that your own cash flow supports. It is that simple.
I never argue with the tape. If a stock goes down, I get out.
I keep my losses small and let my profits run. That is the whole secret.
Whatever failures I have known, whatever errors I have committed, have been the consequence of action without thought.
When you have a system, the hardest part is following it when it's losing.
The worst thing in fashion is to be ubiquitous. The hardest thing is knowing when to say no.
I always say you could publish my trading rules in the newspaper and no one would follow them. The key is consistency and discipline.
Being far away from Wall Street was the best thing for my investing. I couldn't hear the noise.
Peer review isn't slow. It's thorough. The crypto industry would break fewer things if it tried breaking fewer things.
Every position must have a thesis. If you cannot explain why you own it in two sentences, you should not own it.
Cutting your losses is not admitting failure. It is preserving capital for the next fight.
Profitability before IPO is not conservative. It is respectful. It means you are not asking public investors to fund your experiments.
Knowing when to sell is harder than knowing when to buy. Most people get that backwards.
Buying shares when they are out of favour and selling them when they become popular is simple to describe but requires discipline and patience to practise.
The whole secret to winning and losing in the stock market is to lose the least amount possible when you are not right.
The secret to trading is not finding the perfect system. It is finding a system that has an edge and then executing it without letting your emotions get in the way.
The riskiest moment is when you are right. That is when you put on too much weight, get overconfident, and lose discipline.
The hardest part of investing is not finding the best stocks. It is managing your own behavior.
Patience is not passive. It is active discipline applied over time.
The role of a strategist is to provide clarity when markets are generating noise.
Emotion is the enemy of good market analysis. The model removes the emotion.
A quantitative model is only as good as the discipline to follow it when it tells you something uncomfortable.
When my model's indicators turn negative, I turn negative. It's not complicated — you just have to trust the data.
The goal is not to predict. The goal is to respond to what the market is showing you with discipline and without emotion.
The primary trend of the market is your most powerful ally. Never fight it.
The only stage you should buy in is Stage 2. Any other time you buy, you are guessing.
Do not try to buy the bottom of Stage 4. You will catch falling knives. Wait for Stage 1 to complete. Then wait for Stage 2. Then act.
What every successful trader has in common is not a methodology but a discipline. They all follow their system without deviation.
The key to trading success is emotional discipline. If intelligence were the key, there would be a lot more people making money trading.
Going to the army was the most important decision in my life. Everything I learned about discipline, I learned there.
I saw the Hainan bubble from the inside. When you see speculation that wild, the only smart thing to do is take your money and leave.
I never sold a good piece of land at the wrong time. The biggest mistakes in this business come from selling too early.
Building a business requires three things: hard work, correct timing, and the discipline not to be greedy when prices are high.
The hardest decision is always to hold when everyone around you is selling. But that is precisely when irreplaceable assets trade at their biggest discounts.
The most important lesson my father passed on is that the exit is as important as the entry. Knowing when to sell is at least half the skill.
Property markets move in cycles. The discipline is to be prepared when others are not — to have the resources to act at the right moment.
Every project we built, we built to last fifty years. Not five. That discipline separates serious developers from opportunists.
The best deals I have done are the ones I said no to. Walking away is a skill most developers never learn.
In real estate, reputation is balance sheet. You can lose money on a project and recover. Lose your reputation and you are finished.
We are not going to do a deal just to do a deal. Every acquisition has to create long-term value for our shareholders and our customers.
When you are holding stocks, if it goes up, do not be too happy. When it goes down, do not be too sad.
In commodities, you must understand your product better than anyone else. There is no room for guessing.
Multiples would be built with a long-term perspective, which meant no short cuts, no compromise of the long-term prospects for quick wins.
Entrepreneurs must respect capital as it is not free.
Fail fast and spend as little money as possible to get your ideas validated.
You'd better do your homework and do all of the testing beforehand so you know what you will do.
The market has taught me to ignore the market most of the time. Just stick to fundamental investing.
I am a very happy person, but I cannot enjoy my hobbies as much as I would like, because I need to be, literally, like an Olympic athlete.
You can't just be a little bit systematic.
There will be the apology tour and the apology fund. The next fund will be 0.3 times the size of the last fund.
You cannot pay any price for any stock, no matter how good. No matter how great the company is.
We do not invest in non-innovative, heavy-asset businesses, in fields outside our expertise, or in ventures with moral hazards.
We stay in the sectors we understand. Technology, consumer, healthcare. Outside that, we are just guessing.
Talk less about feelings, talk more about numbers, talk about your statements and your progress.
If you improve by just 0.1 percent per day, after a year you will be 44 percent better at what you do.
We are a disciplined investor, not a very prolific one. We don't do deals every week. We tend to spend time working with entrepreneurs, figuring out what issue they're trying to address and how we can help them.
So if a company does not have a clear path to profitability, then that's not a company we will invest in.
In power lifting, you're essentially maxing out, and you are completely stressing your body all the way to its limit.
We're not trying to lowball or be sharks, we're trying to apply what we think is the appropriate fair market value — even in a market where other investors may be willing to pay much higher.
We wanted to slow the pace down quite a bit relative to what was in vogue at the time.