It’s good to learn from your mistakes. It’s better to learn from other people’s mistakes.
Opportunities
Opportunities come infrequently. When it rains gold, put out the bucket, not the thimble.
Greed
Be fearful when others are greedy and greedy when others are fearful.
Comfort
In some corner of the world they are probably still holding regular meetings of the Flat Earth Society. We derive no comfort because important people, vocal people, or great numbers of people agree with us. Nor do we derive comfort if they don’t.
Silly people
You’re dealing with a lot of silly people in the marketplace; it’s like a great big casino and everyone else is boozing. If you can stick with Pepsi, you should be O.K.
Lemmings
Failing conventionally is the route to go ; as a group, lemmings may have a rotten image, but no individual lemming has ever received bad press.
Crowd
You need to divorce your mind from the crowd. The herd mentality causes all these IQ’s to become paralyzed. I don’t think investors are now acting more intelligently, despite the intelligence. Smart doesn’t always equal rational. To be a successful investor you must divorce yourself from the fears and greed of the people around you, although it is almost impossible.
Price action
For some reason, people take their cues from price action rather than from values. What doesn’t work is when you start doing things that you don’t understand or because they worked last week for somebody else. The dumbest reason in the world to buy a stock is because it’s going up.