You have hedge funds and people like that buying these assets to yield 15 or 20 percent, I mean, that's the buyer for these people that are trying to unload them.
The financial calculus that Charlie and I employ would never permit our trading a good night's sleep for a shot at a few extra percentage points of return. I've never believed in risking what my friends and family have and need in order to pursue what they don't have and don't need.
If you know how to value businesses, it's crazy to own 50 stocks or 40 stocks or 30 stocks, probably because there aren't that many wonderful businesses understandable to a single human being in all likelihood. To forego buying more of some super-wonderful business and instead put your money into #30 or #35 on your list of attractiveness just strikes Charlie and me as madness.
Businesses always have opportunities to improve service, product lines, manufacturing techniques, and the like, and obviously these opportunities should be seized. But a business that constantly encounters major change also encounters many chances for major error
I never attempt to make money on the stock market. I buy on the assumption that they could close the market the next day and not reopen it for five years.
I've seen more people fail because of liquor and leverage -- leverage being borrowed money. You really don't need leverage in this world much. If you're smart, you're going to make a lot of money without borrowing.
It's going to be tough because the economy is going to be getting worse for a while. And it might fall off a cliff if this doesn't pass. But nobody will ever know that if it does.
I mean, they were getting the mortgage of some guy in Omaha, you know, securitized a couple of times. I mean he had all these - they had all these types from Wall Street, you know, and they had advanced degrees, and they look very alert, and they came with these - they came with these things that said gamma and alpha and sigma and all that. And all I can say is beware of geeks, you know, bearing formulas. They've heard that in Europe.