Whitney Tilson Quotes
100 Whitney Tilson Quotes
1 2 3
The fundamentals that unite value investors are many… 1) We tend to buy what’s out-of-favor 2) We focus on intrinsic company value 3) We understand and profit from reversion to the mean 4) We understand that beating the market requires a portfolio that looks quite different from the market... 5) We focus on avoiding permanent losses 6) We typically invest with a multiyear time horizon 7) We pride ourselves on conducting in-depth and proprietary analysis 8) We spend much of our time reading 9) We spend time analyzing and understanding ‘micro’ factors 10) We cast a wide net 11) We make our own decisions and 12) We admit our mistakes.
Whitney Tilson
Why isn’t everyone a value investor. A simple explanation is that you must be able to estimate the value of a business, which requires a great deal of skill and experience to do with reasonable accuracy.
Whitney Tilson
Research shows that people perceive the pain of loss about twice as strongly as the pleasure of a comparable gain. With it’s decidedly contrarian bent, value investing can sometimes fail to work for long periods of time, causing plenty of pain.
Whitney Tilson
A… reason investors don’t embrace value investing is that it’s a get-rich-slowly approach. We are all hardwired to pursue actions that offer immediate gratification.
Whitney Tilson
Value investors typically scour deeply out-of-favor sectors for opportunities, looking for the proverbial babies thrown out with the bath water.
Whitney Tilson
There’s one more reason that value investors probably aren’t at risk of being overrun by too many like-minded competitors: Value investing lacks drama. Poring over numbers and digging for deeper insight into a company or industry isn’t exactly the adrenaline rush sought by the Jim Cramer, Mad Money crowd.
Whitney Tilson
We’d suggest an alternative view of excitement: Sleeping well at night and compounding your money safely and at a decent clip over time seems like fun to us.
Whitney Tilson
When pessimism and fear rule, bargains are created that sow the seeds of future investment success.
Whitney Tilson
The excitement in hard time – when stocks of great companies get cheap enough to buy – often beats the rush in good times when existing holdings hit new highs.
Whitney Tilson
[On describing the feeling of buying supercheap stocks] Trembling with greed.
Whitney Tilson
[In September 2008] We simply think it’s too early to turn bullish on the financial sector.
Whitney Tilson
[In January 2009] We’re confident that selective bargain hunting today will pay off handsomely in the future.
Whitney Tilson
In any market characterized by panic selling, even the best companies can see their share prices fall much further than their long-term business values would warrant.
Whitney Tilson
Investing always involves uncertainty.
Whitney Tilson
The market often errs by confusing uncertainty with risk.
Whitney Tilson
Just because a company’s future is highly uncertain doesn’t mean an investment in it is risky.
Whitney Tilson
Some of the best potential investments are highly uncertain but have little risk of permanent capital loss.
Whitney Tilson
[In January 2009] Many more… opportunities exist today than there have been in a long time.
Whitney Tilson
We admit to being loyal Buffett disciples.
Whitney Tilson
[In 2009] A number of the smartest value investors we know lost 40 percent, 50 percent, 60 percent, or more during the year as markets around the world crashed – and we would have likely been in the same boat had we not developed tremendous conviction about how bad the mortgage meltdown would be and acted on it.
Whitney Tilson
[On Gold in January 2010] Making money on the yellow metal is less a function of a rise in its fundamental value and more a function of finding someone who is willing to pay you more for it.
Whitney Tilson
[In January 2010] We respect many of those who advocate gold, but, like Ackman and Robertson, we believe it’s too difficult to assign a value to the metal. Instead, we prefer high-quality companies with significant foreign exposure and the ability to raise prices.
Whitney Tilson
20 Common Pitfalls Investors Routinely Commit to Shoot Themselves in the Foot: 1) Herding behavior, driven by a desire to be part of the crowd or an assumption that the crowd is omniscient 2) Using mental accounting to treat some money (such as gambling winnings or an unexpected bonus) differently than other money 3) Excessive aversion to loss 4) Fear of change, resulting in an excessive bias for the status quo 5) Fear of making an incorrect decision and feeling stupid 6) Failing to act due to an abundance of attractive options 7) Ignoring important data points and focusing excessively on less important ones 8) ‘Anchoring’ on irrelevant data 9) Overestimating the likelihood of certain events based on very memorable data or experiences 10) Overestimating the degree to which they would have predicted the correct outcome of an event after learning of the results of that event 11) Allowing an overabundance of short-term information to cloud long-term judgments 12) Drawing conclusions from a limited sample size 13) Reluctance to admit mistakes 14) Believing that their investment success is due to their wisdom rather than a rising market 15) Failing to accurately assess their investment time horizon 16) A tendency to seek only information that confirms their opinions or decisions 17) Failing to recognize the large cumulative impact of small amounts over time 18) Forgetting the powerful tendency of regression to the mean 19) Confusing familiarity with knowledge 20) Overconfidence.
Whitney Tilson
At the end of the day, we’re just trying to buy 50 cent dollars and short 5 dollar dollars I’d say.
Whitney Tilson
We like to say we pray in the Church of Graham Dodd, Buffett and Munger.
Whitney Tilson
Charlie Munger and Warren Buffett, who are our sort of investment heroes.
Whitney Tilson
[On Charlie Munger and Warren Buffett – If they were running a couple of hundred million dollar fund.] What would they be doing?
Whitney Tilson
[In January 2012] We run a hedge fund and we do short some stocks as well. We took a lot of pain on that for a while, but recently some of our shorts are turning out rather well.
Whitney Tilson
[In January 2012] We view IBM as much less risky than a typical technology company…[On Warren Buffett] He’s looking to buy thing’s he can hold for decades…
Whitney Tilson
[On Warren Buffett investing in IBM in January 2012] I think he’ll have the last laugh on this one.
Whitney Tilson
Berkshire I think is going to grind out decent returns for many years…
Whitney Tilson
We were short financials like crazy in 2008… Our long book got killed of course…
Whitney Tilson
[In January 2012] We only got back into financials in August…
Whitney Tilson
You can’t kick the can down the road on what percentage of mortgages missed their first payment…
Whitney Tilson
[On Citibank being $26 a share in January 2012 when he thinks it is worth it’s book value at around $50 a share] We can make a very nice return even if it takes 2 or 3 years for the market to come to it’s senses on this one…
Whitney Tilson
[On Italian bonds in January 2012] I don’t actually think Italy is going to default… But I mean 7 percent…
Whitney Tilson
[In January 2012] I think that anyone buying US 10 year treasuries yielding 2 percent is certifiably insane… given the printing presses are running… That’s a terrible investment…
Whitney Tilson
[In January 2012] I scratch my head at the low interest rates [that] investors are willing to accept…
Whitney Tilson
It’s just insane if you’re a retiree, it’s a pool of capital that’s going to pay out health care benefits in 20 or 30 years, earning two percent in a currency where there’s likely to be inflation greater than two percent. That’s insane.
Whitney Tilson
Investing is a probabilistic business.
Whitney Tilson
1 2 3
Return from Whitney Tilson Quotes to
Quoteswise.com