Martin Whitman Quotes
108 Martin Whitman Quotes
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[In Sept 2000 on the Nasdaq despite it’s recent plunge.] Fantastically overpriced – I’ve lived through a lot of speculative bubbles, but never one this big.
Martin Whitman
The one thing I hate about mutual fund business is that you don’t control the cash flows.
Martin Whitman
[In Sept 2000 on CRO’s – Contract research organizations that help drug manufacturers test new products.] In some cases you can buy these things for under book value and less than ten times depressed earnings.
Martin Whitman
Of course I’m different. I know I’m different.
Martin Whitman
If you had told me seven years ago I would be so heavily involved as a value investor in small-cap high-tech plays, I would have said forget about it.
Martin Whitman
[Wall Street spends too much time.] Making predictions about unpredictable things.
Martin Whitman
[On his celebrity title as a ‘Vulture Investor’] It’s a lot better than being called an indexer or an asset allocator.
Martin Whitman
Lots of these guys were quite smart. Even though they didn’t need the cash at that time, when the market was terrific, they took advantage of the opportunity to raise a lot of money.
Martin Whitman
When you’re in well-capitalized companies, if they do start to dissipate, you get a chance to get out. On the other hand, when you’re in poorly capitalized companies, you better watch the quarterly reports very closely.
Martin Whitman
I’ve held securities for three years and sold them for a double only to see them triple over the subsequent six months. [Moral] Just sitting around is a better way to make money.
Martin Whitman
I couldn’t be a trader.
Martin Whitman
[On value investing.] It’s the art of the possible. The aim is not to maximize profits, but to be consistent at low risk. I never mind leaving something on the table.
Martin Whitman
[On Wall Street] It was ridiculous. Ninety-eight percent of the emphasis was on short-term earnings and the near-term outlook.
Martin Whitman
Preparation, preparation, preparation.
Martin Whitman
I did what I wanted to do. I showed Wall Street and the academicians, all those efficient market guys, that they don’t know what they’re doing.
Martin Whitman
[On junk bonds after the crash.] There are huge profit potentials in owning junk.
Martin Whitman
A bargain that stays a bargain isn’t a bargain.
Martin Whitman
Part of the process of becoming an intelligent passive investor is to understand not only the general financial environment but also who the other participants in the investment process are…
Martin Whitman
In value investing, the goal is to determine a business’s worth and its possible or probable dynamics, all independent of the price at which the common stock issued by that business trades.
Martin Whitman
Value investing is different from other kinds of investing. It is wholly unrelated to technical and chartist analyses.
Martin Whitman
If future earnings or cash flows do not create wealth, then those earnings were fictitious to begin with.
Martin Whitman
In value investing, the essential goal is to value a business or the workout potential for credits issued by troubled companies.
Martin Whitman
In value investing, macrofactors such as the level of stock averages (eg The Dow-Jones Industrials), forecasts of interest rates, or the gross domestic product (GDP) are ignored.
Martin Whitman
In value investing, corporate analysis is viewed as something separate and distinct from market analysis. In other disciplines, corporate analysis and market analysis are almost always integrated with each other.
Martin Whitman
In value investing, the analyst is extremely price conscious in making judgments about the attractiveness of a security.
Martin Whitman
On Wall Street, value investing seems very much to be a minority approach restricted to investors trafficking in corporate control; but on Main Street, where most businesses are privately owned, it appears to be the majority approach.
Martin Whitman
Value investing… revolves around obtaining a fairly deep understanding of either the business, the securities issued by that business, or both.
Martin Whitman
Value is a dynamic concept.
Martin Whitman
Because every investment has something wrong, the trick is certainly not to find perfect investments but to arrive at judgments that not enough is wrong to dissuade investing.
Martin Whitman
Equity investing always involves trade-offs.
Martin Whitman
In value investing, the investor does not gauge timing but rather takes advantage of whatever the market situation happens to be at that time.
Martin Whitman
Nothing happens in the financial community that does not entail huge transaction costs for clients, whether those clients are retail, institutional, or corporate.
Martin Whitman
Any attempts to predict markets, to predict near-term securities prices, or to measure market results consistently (i.e., all the time) is speculation, not investment. On Wall Street, such people are called investors; in value investing, they are speculators.
Martin Whitman
Value investing just does not work for people deeply involved in trying to predict near-term stock prices or general trends for securities markets or commodities markets.
Martin Whitman
Good past market performance may mean a dearth of good present investments.
Martin Whitman
[On purchasing shares based on practical valuation techniques.] Think Main Street not Wall Street.
Martin Whitman
In the safe and cheap approach, little or no use is made of esoteric derivatives.
Martin Whitman
The most attractive value investments are in the common stocks of extremely well financed companies, which sell at material discounts from readily ascertainable net asset values.
Martin Whitman
Diversification is only a surrogate, and usually a damn poor surrogate, for knowledge, control, and price consciousness.
Martin Whitman
Different market participants have different rationalities. What is rational for safe and cheap investors (e.g., ignore near-term market swings) would be utterly irrational for heavily margined day traders who know little or nothing about the securities they buy and sell, and vice versa.
Martin Whitman
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