Martin Whitman Quotes
108 Martin Whitman Quotes (Marty Whitman, Martin J Whitman, Third Avenue Value Funds)
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Most investors are outlook-conscious. I’m price conscious.
Martin Whitman
Diversification is a poor substitute for knowledge.
Martin Whitman
Value investing entails buying what is safe and cheap.
Martin Whitman
Biting the bullet is great if it’s someone else’s teeth.
Martin Whitman
The funny thing about Graham and Dodd is everyone talks about them and nobody’s read them.
Martin Whitman
[In 1999] Seeing what was happening in the general market, in Internet stocks and in S&P 500 stocks, you’d have thought the inmates were running the asylum. Maybe things are different this time, but I doubt it.
Martin Whitman
A lot of what Wall Street does has nothing to do with the underlying value of a business. We deal in probabilities, not predictions.
Martin Whitman
There are only two kinds of passive investing, value investing and speculative excess.
Martin Whitman
When the outlook stinks, you may not have to pay to play.
Martin Whitman
Every investment has something wrong with it.
Martin Whitman
There is no general risk – only specific risk.
Martin Whitman
In value investing, what you think of underlying factors tends to be more important than what you think other people think most of the time.
Martin Whitman
In value investing, a price is one thing and a value can be something quite different.
Martin Whitman
The secret to success in safe and cheap investing is not to obtain superior (or earlier) information, but rather to use the available information in a superior manner.
We… believe that no financial market can approach instantaneous efficiency…
Martin Whitman
Passive investment products tend to be sold by salespeople rather than bought by investors.
Martin Whitman
In the financial world, it tends to be misleading to state ‘There is no free lunch.’ Rather the more meaningful comment is ‘Somebody has to pay for lunch.’
Martin Whitman
One good deal may be worth twenty years of brilliant operations.
Martin Whitman
Somebody always has to pay for lunch.
Martin Whitman
Very little in distress investing lends itself to certainty. Rather, the investor always deals in probabilities.
Martin Whitman
Time is the enemy of unsecured creditors…
Martin Whitman
The goal of any businessperson is to create wealth…
Martin Whitman
Making forecasts about future general market levels, is much more in the realm of abnormal psychology than finance.
Martin Whitman
Corporate world is rarely linear.
Martin Whitman
If after 10 minutes at the poker table you do not know who the patsy is, you are the patsy.
Martin Whitman
Mutual fund management is a license to steal.
Martin Whitman
[In 1999] As for dealing with the public, you may quote me: Screw ‘em.
Martin Whitman
[In 1999 after two down years.] The reason we are down is largely because of our large positions in two title-insurance stocks, First American Financial and Stewart Information Services. Their earnings are holding up, but their price-earnings ratios went from 10 to 5. Since we take big positions, if nothing is really going up, it takes only a few bad stocks to send the fund down. [Both stocks subsequently advanced.]
Martin Whitman
[In 1999] What counts is the deal, not all the other stuff. The last time that global events were more important to long-term investors than the deal in moving the stock market was 1933.
Martin Whitman
[In 1999 on what he wants to see in a stock he buys.] Something that’s cheap and safe. The first things I want are high-quality resources, the absence of liability and the presence of cash. Second, I want the price3 to be at a big discount to the resources – that is, to the net asset value per share.
Martin Whitman
More important than cheap is safe.
Martin Whitman
Earnings are vastly over-rated.
Martin Whitman
No smart businessman treats one accounting number as more important than another. They are all part of the whole. The goal of any businessperson is to create wealth, and except on Wall Street, profits are viewed as the least desirable way to create wealth because of the income-tax disadvantage.
Martin Whitman
If you have good management, it will convert those resources into something of value.
Martin Whitman
If you’re doing it right, value is a very dynamic concept – it’s always increasing.
Martin Whitman
What a private buyer will pay to control a company has nothing to do with what the stock sells for on the stock market.
Martin Whitman
[In 1999] I’m not perfect. I miss a lot. Third Avenue came within a hair of buying Intel, Compaq and Sun Microsystems when they were down a few years ago, but I never pulled the trigger. Shame on me.
Martin Whitman
Evaluating management is the toughest thing I do.
Martin Whitman
The kind of investing I do doesn’t really depend on how the public stock market does. If I’m right, these very undervalued companies will be taken over, liquidated or refinanced, and that’s where you make your money.
Martin Whitman
[In 1999] Six months ago we owned more than 5% of 22 companies. Since then, three were taken over, we have been approached about joining hostile takeovers of four others and six have made acquisitions, which shows their ability to convert cash into future earnings.
Martin Whitman
[In 1999 on bargain opportunities in small-company stocks.] The trouble is that the public is redeeming shares in Third Avenue at the wrong time, causing us to sell at the wrong prices.
Martin Whitman
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