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I don't invest in what I don't understand. And I don't want to understand Facebook.

Charlie Munger

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Charlie Munger
Age: 100
Born: 1924
Born: January 1
Business Person
Financier
Investor
Lawyer
Omaha
Nebraska
Charlie Thomas Munger
Charles T. Munger
Charles Thomas Munger
Invest
Understand

More quotes by Charlie Munger

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Wesco had a market capitalization of $40 million when we bought it [in the early 1970s]. It's $2 billion now. It's been a long slog to a perfectly respectable outcome - not as good as Berkshire Hathaway or Microsoft, but there's always someone in life who's done better.
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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Acknowledging what you don't know is the dawning of wisdom.
Charlie Munger
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Intelligent people make decisions based on opportunity costs.
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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Great investing requires a lot of delayed gratification.
Charlie Munger
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Being rational is a moral Imperative. You should never be stupider than you need to be.
Charlie Munger
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Never, ever, think about something else when you should be thinking about the power of incentives.
Charlie Munger
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I think the idea that the hedge fund manager gets lower taxes than the taxi driver or the physics professor is insane. The legislators who leave that policy in place are derelict in their duties to be rational and fair. There are plenty of them in both political parties. It's totally outrageous.
Charlie Munger
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If the technology hadn't changed, they [newspapers] would still be great businesses. Network TV [in its heyday], anyone could run and do well. If Tom Murphy as running it, you'd do very well, but even your idiot nephew could do well. Fortunately, carbide cutting tools [such as those made by Iscar] don't have these types of substitutes.
Charlie Munger
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Almost all good businesses engage in 'pain today, gain tomorrow' activities.
Charlie Munger
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Trying to prioritize among things we're unlikely to do is pretty fruitless.
Charlie Munger
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Bernie Ebbers and Ken Lay were caricatures - they were easy to spot. They were almost psychopaths. But it's much harder to spot problems at companies like Royal Dutch [Shell].
Charlie Munger
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Investing is where you find a few great companies and then sit on your ass.
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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Financial institutions make us nervous when they're trying to do well.
Charlie Munger
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Mimicking the herd invites regression to the mean.
Charlie Munger
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Let me know what your problem is, and I will try to make it more difficult for you.
Charlie Munger
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Sears had layers and layers of people it didn't need. It was very bureaucratic. It was slow to think. And there was an established way of thinking. If you poked your head up with a new thought, the system kind of turned against you. It was everything in the way of a dysfunctional big bureaucracy that you would expect.
Charlie Munger
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It would be easier to screw up American Express than Coke or Gillette, but it's an immensely strong business.
Charlie Munger