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Here's some of the best advice offered by late investing legend Charlie Munger

Nov 29, 2023, 06:23 IST
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Charlie Munger spent decades as the vice chairman of Berkshire Hathaway.Nati Harnik/AP
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Well-known investor Charlie Munger has died at the age of 99 after a decades-long career.

Up until his death on Tuesday, Munger was at the helm of Berkshire Hathaway alongside Warren Buffett as the company's vice chairman.

Buffett and Munger shared the hometown of Omaha, and the pair led Berkshire into success spanning generations. Along the way, the billionaire business partners gave their critical, wise, and snappy opinions to young investors striving for their legend status.

Over the years, Munger has sold or donated more than 75% of his shares in Berkshire Hathaway. Today, Munger's net worth is estimated at about $2.6 billion, according to Forbes. Had he kept his stock he could've been worth over $10 billion.

"I'm deliberately taking my net worth down," he told The Omaha World-Herald in 2013. "My thinking is, I'm not immortal, and I won't need it where I'm going."

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Here are some of the best advice quotes that have been attributed to Munger.

In the last decades of his life, Munger began selling or donating the majority of his Berkshire stock.Bonnie Schiffman Photography/Getty Images
  1. "When you know you have an edge, you should bet heavily. They don't teach most people that in business school. It's insane. Of course you've got to bet heavily on your best bets."

  2. "The great lesson of life is get them the hell out of your life — and do it fast," Munger said about toxic people.

  3. "There are maybe five, six times in a lifetime when you know you're right, you know you have one that's really going to work wonderfully, and you get a chance to do it. People who do it two or three times early, they all go broke because they think it's easy. In fact it's very hard and rare."

  4. "In my whole life, I have known no wise people who didn't read all the time — none, zero."

  5. "The first rule is that you can't really know anything if you just remember isolated facts and try and bang 'em back."

  6. "Almost everybody that has an unusually good result has three things: They're very intelligent, they worked very hard, and they were very lucky. It takes all three to get them on this list of the super successful. How can you arrange to have two or three episodes of good luck? The answer is you can start early and keep trying a long time, and maybe you'll get one or two."

  7. "The game of life is the game of everlasting learning. At least it is if you want to win."

  8. "What do you want to avoid? Such an easy answer: sloth and unreliability. If you're unreliable, it doesn't matter what your virtues are. You're going to crater immediately. Doing what you have faithfully engaged to do should be an automatic part of your conduct. You want to avoid sloth and unreliability."

  9. "The big money is not in the buying and selling, but in the waiting."

  10. "Spend each day trying to be a little wiser than you were when you woke up."

  11. "The best thing a human being can do is to help another human being know more."

  12. "Invest in a business any fool can run, because someday a fool will. If it won't stand a little mismanagement, it's not much of a business. We're not looking for mismanagement, even if we can withstand it."

  13. "Obviously if you want to get good at something which is competitive, you have to think about it and practice a lot. You have to keep learning because [the] world keeps changing and competitors keep learning. You have to go to bed wiser than you got up. As you try to master what you are trying to do — people who do that almost never fail utterly. Very few have ever failed with that approach. You may rise slowly, but you are sure to rise."

  14. "You don't have a lot of envy."

  15. "You don't have a lot of resentment."

  16. "You don't overspend your income."

  17. "You stay cheerful in spite of your troubles."

  18. "You deal with reliable people."

  19. "And you do what you're supposed to do," Munger told CNBC in 2019.

  20. "You'll do better if you have passion for something in which you have aptitude. If Warren had gone into ballet, no one would have heard of him."

  21. "The 'know-nothing' investor should practice diversification, but it is crazy if you are an expert. The goal of investment is to find situations where it is safe not to diversify. If you only put 20% into the opportunity of a lifetime, you are not being rational. Very seldom do we get to buy as much of any good idea as we would like to."

  22. "Self-pity gets fairly close to paranoia, and paranoia is one of the very hardest things to reverse. You do not want to drift into self-pity. ... Self-pity will not improve the situation."

  23. If you've got two suitors who are eager to have you, but one is way better than the other, you're going to choose that one rather than the other. That's the way we filter stock buying opportunities. Our ideas are so simple. People keep asking us for mysteries, but all we have are the most elementary ideas."

  24. "The liabilities are always 100% good. It's the assets you have to worry about."

  25. "It's so simple to spend less than you earn, and invest shrewdly, and avoid toxic people and toxic activities, and try and keep learning all your life, and do a lot of deferred gratification. If you do all those things, you are almost certain to succeed. If you don't, you're going to need a lot of luck."

  26. "Well, at Berkshire, we have a simple problem of estate planning. Just hold the goddamn stock."

  27. "Most people probably shouldn't do anything other than have index funds. … That is a perfectly rational thing to do for somebody who just doesn't want to think much about it and has no reason to think he has any advantage as a stock picker. Why should he try and pick his own stocks? He doesn't design his own electric motors and his egg beater."

  28. "I think fewer and fewer people are really needed in stock picking. Mostly it's charlatanism to charge 3 percentage points per year or something like that to manage somebody else's money."

  29. "I think that the modern investor, to get ahead, almost has to get in a few stocks that are way above average…. They try and have a few Apples or Googles or so on, just to keep up, because they know that a significant percentage of all the gains that come to all the common stockholders combined is going to come from a few of these super competitors."

  30. "You have to get better and better or you will lose. Try harder, work harder and you'll do better."

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