Ron Brierley Quotes

105 Ron Brierley Quotes (Sir Ron Brierley, Sir Ronald Brierley, BIL, GPG, IEL, IEP, Brierley Investments Ltd)

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[In 1999.] To make money fast, make it slowly.
Ron Brierley

[In 1987 on questions on whether a crash was coming.] Shares don’t go up forever, they never have and they never will.
Ron Brierley

[In November 1987.] In every cycle, there’s an increasing number of people who forget that there were previous cycles, and they genuinely believe that share prices are forever only going to go up.
Ron Brierley

[In 1990 looking back on experiencing one of his first economic downturns.] I have always been aware of the value of liquidity, but that made me doubly, trebly conscious of the prudence and the eventual strategic value of having excess liquidity.
Ron Brierley

[In 1990.] You might say, that I’m someone who goes to the absolute brink and has a fair degree of nerve and determination and doesn’t go under when the crunch goes on.
Ron Brierley

[In 1990.] If you own the value, the unlocking is secondary. Once you own something if the value is there, you might have to rack your brains to find a solution, but it is better than finding there is no value to unlock.
Ron Brierley

[In 1999.] If it is unfashionable, it’s presumably cheap or appears to be cheap. Therefore your downside is limited.
Ron Brierley

[In 1999.] My strength was to research companies and to reach a conclusion that their assets were worth more than their sharemarket price and to work out ways to exploit that to our own advantage in the most effective way.
Ron Brierley

[In 2003.] I can honestly say that I never waivered in my belief that there were asset values well in excess of sharemarket values.
Ron Brierley

[In 2003.] The sounder the advice, the less exciting and the less romantic it is.
Ron Brierley



[In 1978 on Bruce Judge who later spectacularly crashed soon after the October 1987 crash with a company called Ariadne. Bruce Judge had gone out on his own separately from Ron Brierley in the early 1980’s.] It is difficult to afford the luxury of Bruce Judge, as this man is capable of destroying with one bizarre acquisition everything I’ve built up.
Ron Brierley

[In 1983 on the New Zealand stock market.] Price levels quite beyond belief suggest the stock exchange has replaced the totalisator [Betting shop.] as a symbol of financial escapism.
Ron Brierley

[In 1987.] Markets are historically very buoyant and it can’t last forever. There’ll be some reaction at some stage but that’s of course the whole secret of any share market investment - it’s simply timing
Ron Brierley

[In 1987 on when there will be a stock market crash.] For New Zealand 1987 will be a crunch year for many of the newer companies and I think the same applies to the Australian market as well. So I see this being a very interesting year in terms of a new set of circumstances, probably after all the media activity dies down.
Ron Brierley

[On the hypothetical question on whether his company could justify paying the prices being paid in 1987 for media companies such as Channel 9 and some newspapers.] I feel we’d be struggling to do so.
Ron Brierley

[In November 1987 on the October 1987 stock market crash.] It’s not that unusual, really. That’s been the history of markets for hundreds of years. They go up and they go down.
Ron Brierley

[In November 1987.] I was viewed as anti-establishment, a renegade, dangerous, and a threat to the established order - as well as an unlikely survivor.
Ron Brierley

[In November 1987.] We have always looked for older, more solid, more asset or capital-based companies. The sort of companies that we are buying are much more likely to have been formed in the 19th century than in the 20th century. We tend to try to avoid labor-intensive operations; we certainly avoid high tech…
Ron Brierley

[In November 1987.] We’re in ships and coal mines and wharves and warehouses – something you can see; something you can understand; something that’s solid. Unspectacular.
Ron Brierley

[In November 1987 on what caused the rise that lead to the October 1987 stock market crash.] A sort of mass euphoria. There always seemed to be so much more money available. People see others making money, so there’s a tendency to pour even more funds into the stock market to share in this big bonanza. While that’s happening, obviously, it is self-fulfilling.
Ron Brierley



[In November 1987.] I’ve always been a believer in looking at each individual situation on its merits, rather than just taking a sweeping, broad-brush view.
Ron Brierley

[In November 1987.] I’ve always operated on a prudent basis, that one measures one’s commitments very prudently against one’s assets, and what might happen in the future.
Ron Brierley

[In November 1987.] I always make a neutral judgment on the people until I know them. Whereas you can make much more of a selective judgment on the value of assets.
Ron Brierley

[In November 1987.] I think one just has to ride with the ups and downs of an economy over the long term.
Ron Brierley

[In November 1987.] I’m much more interested in real values than market values.
Ron Brierley

[In November 1987.] It’s a great pity when well-managed companies which are genuinely trying to maximize shareholder values do get diverted into the other nonsense, the absolute nonsense, of so-called poison pills.
Ron Brierley

[In November 1987 on Smith International.] We began buying the stock when they were well and truly in bankruptcy; the shares were about $2 at the time. My colleagues saw a company that was worth more than $2 a share, even taking a very pessimistic view. They saw a possible settlement of the lawsuit that was hanging over the company, and they saw a bonus in terms of the potential upside of the whole oil industry. Those three factors, actually, all of them, have really come to fruition.
Ron Brierley

[Looking back in 1990 on what he repeated to a government official who had said one thing to him and then was saying the opposite when the crunch came down until Ron showing his excellent memory suddenly repeated the government official’s previous words.] A flea hath smaller fleas that on him prey, and these have smaller fleas to bite ‘em, and so proceed ad infinitum.
Ron Brierley

[In 1990.] We could go broke or we could conquer the world.
Ron Brierley

[‘So whenever his auditors told him his suggestions were in breach of the Society of Accountants’ standards, he would invariable reply.] Where does it say that in the Companies Act? [The answer was, of course, nowhere…]
Ron Brierley



[In 1990 - ‘This is all tax free. I’ve got it all organised so that I don’t pay a cent in tax.’ - Bob Blackburn.] I see we still have something in common Bob.
Ron Brierley

[In 1990.] That we should be the end-owner has always been my vision. I’ve never been attracted to businesses where the only intention was to sell them. That suggests you don’t want to own them. If that’s the case, you don’t have the right to own them. It’s true I might buy a company and later face the fact that the smarter move was to sell it to a more compatible company. Of course, opportunism is a big factor.
Ron Brierley

[In 1990.] There are downsides and upsides.
Ron Brierley

[In 1990 on BIL’s history. (Now GuocoLeisure Limited)] Almost a cameo of what has happened in the stockmarket. The two are almost totally intertwined.
Ron Brierley

[In February 1992.] We don’t need an army of accountants and executives.
Ron Brierley

[In February 1992.] Some people can make things happen - and others can't.
Ron Brierley

[In February 1992.] Life moves on.
Ron Brierley

[In 1999.] I was also very wary of doing a deal where even though technically you could afford it, if it meant you were stretched to such an extent you then couldn’t do anything else, you’d have to say, ‘What other opportunities are we losing by doing this?’
Ron Brierley

[In 1999.] I’ve always said quite openly that I thought the best long-term solution would be a merger of BIL and GPG because they are both my creations really, so if they both are going to be successful thriving companies why would you want two of them? Why not put them together and get the best of both?
Ron Brierley

[In 1999.] My strength was to research companies and to reach a conclusion that their assets were worth more than their sharemarket price and to work out ways to exploit that to our own advantage in the most effective way. That was my strength. It was my only strength and I’d have to say from my point of view, that I never really wavered from that in 40 years. I’m sitting here in an office in London applying the same principles as I did in the 1960s.
Ron Brierley



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