Quote

I never allow myself to have an opinion on anything that I don't know the other side's argument better than they do.

Charlie Munger

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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
Argument
Side
Sides
Opinion
Anything
Better
Never
Allow

More quotes by Charlie Munger

Image
I always like it when someone attractive to me agrees with me, so I have fond memories of Phil Fisher. The idea that it was hard to find good investments, so concentrate in a few, seems to me to be an obviously good idea. But 98% of the investment world doesn't think this way.
Charlie Munger
Image
You have to have a temperament to grab ideas and do sensible things. Most people don’t grab the right ideas or don’t know what to do with them.
Charlie Munger
Image
The first chance you have to avoid a loss from a foolish loan is by refusing to make it there is no second chance.
Charlie Munger
Image
Clever derivatives broke dozens of companies. It killed them. Bankrupt. We don't need these kinds of innovation in finance. It's OK to be boring in finance. What we want is innovation in widgets.
Charlie Munger
Image
If you can get good at destroying your own wrong ideas, that is a great gift.
Charlie Munger
Image
The world is getting very much more competitive.
Charlie Munger
Image
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
Image
Hard work, honesty, if you keep at it, will get you almost anything.
Charlie Munger
Image
When you borrow a man's car, always return it with a tank of gas.
Charlie Munger
Image
Our job is to find a few intelligent things to do, not to keep up with every damn thing in the world.
Charlie Munger
Image
[With] closet indexing....you're paying a manager a fortune and he has 85% of his assets invested parallel to the indexes. If you have such a system, you're being played for a sucker.
Charlie Munger
Image
It's stupid the way people extrapolate the past -- and not slightly stupid, but massively stupid.
Charlie Munger
Image
The liabilities are always 100 percent good. It's the assets you have to worry about.
Charlie Munger
Image
It would be nice if this [finding really cheap stocks] happened all the time. Unfortunately, it doesn't.
Charlie Munger
Image
There's more honor in investment management than in investment banking.
Charlie Munger
Image
Berkshire has the lowest turnover of any major company in the U.S.The Walton family owns more of Wal-Mart than Buffett owns of Berkshire, so it isn't because of large holdings. It's because we have a really unusual shareholder body that thinks of itself as owners and not holders of little pieces of paper.
Charlie Munger
Image
We don't have an isolated group [of senior managers] surrounded by servants. Berkshire's headquarters is a tiny little suite. We just came back from Berkshire's board meeting it had moved up to the board room of the Kiewit company and [it was so large and luxurious that] I felt uncomfortable.
Charlie Munger
Image
Derivative trading with mark-to-market accounting degenerates into mark-to-model. Two firms make a big derivative trade and the accountants on both sides show a large profit from the same trade.
Charlie Munger
Image
Economics is in many respects the queen of the soft sciences. It's expected to be better than the rest. It's my view that economics is better at the multi-disciplinary stuff than the rest of the soft science. And it's also my view that it's still lousy.
Charlie Munger
Image
Creative accounting is an absolute curse to a civilization. One could argue that double-entry bookkeeping was one of history's great advances. Using accounting for fraud and folly is a disgrace. In a democracy, it often takes a scandal to trigger reform. Enron was the most obvious example of a business culture gone wrong in a long, long time.
Charlie Munger