Investing
Warren Buffett's July 1968 letter to Buffett Partnership partners, one of the letters in Buffett Partnership Letters, 1957–1970.
“As I have mentioned before, we cannot make the same sort of money out of permanent ownership of controlled businesses that can be made from buying and reselling such businesses, or from skilled investment in marketable securities.”
“I make no effort to predict the course of general business or the stock market. Period.”
“The game is being played by the gullible, the self-hypnotized, and the cynical.”
“To create the proper illusions, [stock promotion] frequently requires accounting distortions (one particularly progressive entrepreneur told me he believed in 'bold, imaginative accounting'), tricks of capitalization and camouflage of the true nature of the operating businesses involved.”
“The appetite for [intrinsically cheap stocks], however, tends to substantially diminish the number of fundamentally attractive investments which remain.”
“We live in an investment world, populated not by those who must be logically persuaded to believe, but by the hopeful, credulous and greedy, grasping for an excuse to believe.”