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The world of derivatives is full of holes that very few people are really aware of. It's like hydrogen and oxygen sitting on the corner waiting for a little flame.

Charlie Munger

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Charlie Munger
Age: 101
Born: 1924
Born: January 1
Business Person
Financier
Investor
Lawyer
Omaha
Nebraska
Charlie Thomas Munger
Charles T. Munger
Charles Thomas Munger
People
Sitting
Hydrogen
Full
Oxygen
Waiting
Flame
Littles
Flames
Little
Corner
Really
Holes
Like
Corners
World
Aware
Derivatives

More quotes by Charlie Munger

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Spend each day trying to be a little wiser than you were when you woke up.
Charlie Munger
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One metric catches people. We prefer businesses that drown in cash. An example of a different business is construction equipment. You work hard all year and there is your profit sitting in the yard. We avoid businesses like that. We prefer those that can write us a check at the end of the year.
Charlie Munger
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there are all kinds of wonderful new inventions that give you nothing as owners except the opportunity to spend a lot more money in a business that's still going to be lousy. The money still won't come to you. All of the advantages from great improvements are going to flow through to the customers.
Charlie Munger
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There are two kinds of businesses: The first earns 12%, and you can take it out at the end of the year. The second earns 12%, but all the excess cash must be reinvested - there's never any cash. It reminds me of the guy who looks at all of his equipment and says, 'There's all of my profit.' We hate that kind of business.
Charlie Munger
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How should the best parts of psychology and economics interrelate in an enlightened economist's mind?... I think that these behavioral economics...or economists are probably the ones that are bending them in the correct direction. I don't think it's going to be that hard to bend economics a little to accommodate what's right in psychology.
Charlie Munger
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The stupid and dishonest accountants allowed the genie of totally inappropriate accounting to descend on derivatives books. And once this has happened - people get status, etc. - it's impossible to get it back into the bottle.
Charlie Munger
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If you have competence, you pretty much know its boundaries already. To ask the question (of whether you are past the boundary) is to answer it.
Charlie Munger
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There has never been a master plan. Anyone who wanted to do it, we fired because it takes on a life of its own and doesn't cover new reality. We want people taking into account new information.
Charlie Munger
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No wise pilot, no matter how great his talent and experience, fails to use his checklist.
Charlie Munger
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We're emphasizing the knowable by predicting how certain people and companies will swim against the current. We're not predicting the fluctuation in the current.
Charlie Munger
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I think I've been in the top 5% of my age cohort all my life in understanding the power of incentives, and all my life I've underestimated it.
Charlie Munger
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Once you start doing something bad, then it's easy to take the next step - and in the end, you're a moral sewer.
Charlie Munger
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It's in the nature of stock markets to go way down from time to time. There's no system to avoid bad markets. You can't do it unless you try to time the market, which is a seriously dumb thing to do. Conservative investing with steady savings without expecting miracles is the way to go.
Charlie Munger
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A great business at a fair price is superior to a fair business at a great price.
Charlie Munger
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To some extent, stocks are like Rembrandts. They sell based on what they've sold in the past. Bonds are much more rational. No-one thinks a bond's value will soar to the moon.
Charlie Munger
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There is the sheer amount of Franklin's wisdom. And the talent. Franklin played four instruments. He was the nation's leading scientist and inventor, plus a leading author, statesman, and philanthropist. There has never been anyone like him.
Charlie Munger
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If you can buy the best companies, over time the pricing takes care of itself.
Charlie Munger
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In the 1930s, there was a stretch where you could borrow more against the real estate than you could sell it for. I think that's what's going on in today's private-equity world.
Charlie Munger
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I don't want to sell credit to people who are going to hurt themselves with it. You should only sell products that are good for the people who use them. Some disagree with this, but I know I'm right. That is to say, you're talking to a Republican who admires Elizabeth Warren.
Charlie Munger
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Tthe first rule is that you can't really know anything if you just remember isolated facts and try and bang 'em back. If the facts don't hang together on a latticework of theory, you don't have them in a usable form.... You may have noticed students who just try to remember and pound back what is remembered. Well, they fail in school and in life.
Charlie Munger