Charlie Munger
Charlie Munger
Charles Thomas Mungeris an American businessman, lawyer, investor, and philanthropist. He is vice chairman of Berkshire Hathaway, the conglomerate controlled by Warren Buffett; in this capacity, Buffett describes Charlie Munger as “my partner." Munger served as chairman of Wesco Financial Corporation from 1984 through 2011. He is also the chairman of the Daily Journal Corporation, based in Los Angeles, California, and a director of Costco Wholesale Corporation...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionEntrepreneur
Date of Birth1 January 1924
CountryUnited States of America
I never allow myself to have an opinion on anything that I don't know the other side's argument better than they do.
It's stupid the way people extrapolate the past -- and not slightly stupid, but massively stupid.
This is a good life lesson: getting the right people into your system is the most important thing you can do.
The quality of the medical care delivered, including the pharmaceutical industry, has improved a lot. I don't think it's crazy for a rich country like the USto spend 15% of GDP on healthcare, and if it rose to 16-17%, it's not a big worry.
We have to have a special insight, or we'll put it in the 'too tough' basket. All of you have to look for a special area of competency and focus on that.
It's not supposed to be easy. Anyone who finds it easy is stupid.
Move only when you have an advantage. It's very basic. You have to understand the odds and have the discipline to bet only when the odds are in your favor.
Projections are put together by people who have an interest in a particular outcome, have a subconscious bias, and its apparent precision makes it fallacious. They remind me of Mark Twain's saying, 'A mine is a hole in the ground owned by a liar.' Projections in America are often a lie, although not an intentional one, but the worst kind because the forecaster often believes them himself.
You've got to have models in your head and you've got to array you experience - both vicarious and direct - onto this latticework of mental models.
Here's one truth that perhaps your typical investment counselor would disagree with: if you're comfortably rich and someone else is getting richer faster than you by, for example, investing in risky stocks, so what?! Someone will always be getting richer faster than you. This is not a tragedy.
If we mix only a moderate minority share of turds with the raisins each year, probably no one will recognize what will ultimately become a very large collection of turds.
I knew a guy who had $5 million and owned his house free and clear. But he wanted to make a bit more money to support his spending, so at the peak of the internet bubble he was selling puts on internet stocks. He lost all of his money and his house and now works in a restaurant. It's not a smart thing for the country to legalize gambling [in the stock market] and make it very accessible.
If you have the opportunities of Berkshire, an investment in gold is dumb.
...all man's desired geometric progressions, if a high rate of growth is chosen, at last come to grief on a finite earth. And the social system for man on earth is fair enough, eventually, that almost all massive cheating ends in disgrace.