Price is what you pay. Value is what you get.
The larger the divergence between price and value, the more compelling the opportunity.
The key is not to find good assets, but to find good assets at prices below their intrinsic value.
Value investing is at its core the marriage of a contrarian streak and a calculator.
Risk is not inherent in an investment; it is always relative to the price paid.
Find a business you understand, with a dominant market position, where management has high integrity. That's it. That's the whole strategy.
The Magic Formula works because it ranks companies by two things that matter — how cheap they are and how good they are. Everything else is noise.
Figure out what something is worth, and pay a lot less for it. That's the whole game.
Patience isn't passive. It's the active decision to wait for the right opportunity instead of settling for a mediocre one.
I spent years studying Buffett and Graham. Then I studied monetary history and realized the denominator matters as much as the numerator.
The best investing education in the world is free. Read Buffett's shareholder letters. They're all online.
A cheap stock is not the same as a good investment. That distinction is everything.
Great fundamentals plus great timing equals great returns. You need both, not one or the other.
Factor investing is value investing that finally learned to check its homework against the data.
A catalyst is what separates a value investment from a value trap. Without it, cheap can stay cheap for a very long time.
Value investing has worked over long periods of time. If you need it to work every year, you're not a value investor — you're a performance chaser with good taste in frameworks.
The best investment you can make is in a business so simple that even an idiot could run it — because eventually, one will.
When Citibank was on its knees and everyone was running for the exits, I walked in with $590 million. The best time to invest is when everyone else is too scared to.
Corporate carve-outs are the purest form of value investing in private equity. The seller is motivated by strategy, not price. That is your edge.
Buy assets below replacement cost. If it would cost $1 billion to build and you can buy it for $700 million, the math does itself.
The best investments are the ones where the downside is limited and the upside is unlimited. That requires patience most people don't have.
Price is what you pay, value is what you get. I learned that from Ben Graham. I proved it with $2 billion in 2008.
I look for four things: profitable businesses, honest management, reinvestment opportunities, and a fair price. That's the whole system.
I do not make predictions about the market. I just try to buy good businesses at good prices.
We think like business owners not stock traders. We ask what would a rational buyer pay for this entire company.
We are not contrarian for the sake of being contrarian. We are contrarian because the best values are found where others are not looking.
The definition of value has to evolve. A company growing at 20 percent trading at 15 times earnings is a value stock whether the market calls it one or not.
Our goal is to buy a dollar of value for 60 cents. When we find that we buy a lot of it.
I look for companies that are hated and misunderstood. That is where the biggest discounts are.
The secret to investing is to figure out the value of something and then pay a lot less.
Ariel's motto is slow and steady wins the race. Our mascot is a tortoise. In a world of hares we are proud to be boring.
A cheap stock without a moat is a value trap. An expensive stock with a wide moat is often the better buy.
The best investments are in things that people think are finished. They rarely are.
Leucadia succeeds because we don’t have a strategy. We have a price. If it’s cheap enough, we’ll buy almost anything.
The market undervalues holding companies because most investors can’t do the math. That’s their problem, not mine.
Distressed investing is simple: buy things other people are desperate to sell, at prices that guarantee a margin of safety.
The best investments are the ones that make you slightly uncomfortable. Comfort means the price is too high.
We buy assets. We don’t buy stories. If the asset is worth more than the price, we don’t need a narrative.
I model everything I do after Warren Buffett. If that’s arrogant, so be it. There’s no better model.
I do not invest in what I cannot understand. I invest in things people need every day. Phone calls. Food. Infrastructure.
Buy when others are selling. The best brands in the world occasionally go on sale. You just have to be ready.
If it costs five hundred million to build a steel mill and I can buy one for fifty million, that is a ninety percent margin of safety.
We do not view volatility as risk. Risk is the probability of a permanent loss of capital.
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.
If you buy stocks with high growth rates, you are buying hope. Hope is expensive.
We were not contrarians for its own sake. We were contrarians because the numbers said so.
It's not always easy to do what's not popular, but that's where you make your money.
Sell when the fundamental reasons you bought no longer exist, or when the price target is reached. Not before, not after.
The most important thing Max Heine taught me is to always know what something is worth before you buy it.
We want to buy a dollar of assets for 50 cents. That's it. Everything else is details.
Benjamin Graham taught us that the market is not always right. What he did not say is that the market is always irrational. It is usually right. But when it is wrong, it is very wrong.
Most investors spend too much time on earnings and not enough time on balance sheets. The balance sheet tells you what a company owns. The income statement tells you what management wants you to think.
There is no substitute for knowing more about a company than almost anyone else in the market. That knowledge is the edge.
Safe and cheap. That's my investment philosophy in three words. Everything else is noise.
Benjamin Graham taught me that the key to investing is buying a dollar for fifty cents.
By choosing stocks with a substantial difference between price and value, a wide margin of safety is created. The lower the purchase price relative to value, the lower the risk. Contrary to popular belief, by decreasing risk, this method increases potential reward.
I wanna go do what Bain Capital, and KKR, and Blackstone did 20 years ago. Not what they're doing now, I don't like what they're doing now. I want to do what they used to do, and just copy it, because it worked.