Quote

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

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
Need
Killed
Needs
Clever
Kind
Broke
Companies
Derivatives
Innovation
Dozens
Boring
Bankrupt
Kinds
Finance
Company
Dozen

More quotes by Charlie Munger

Image
Proper accounting is like engineering. You need a margin of safety. Thank God we don't design bridges and airplanes the way we do accounting.
Charlie Munger
Image
The cost of being a publicly traded stock has gone way, way up. It doesn't make sense for a little company to be public anymore. A lot of little companies are going private to be rid of these burdensome requirements.
Charlie Munger
Image
We bought a doomed textile mill [Berkshire Hathaway] and a California S&L [Savings & Loan Wesco] just before a calamity. Both were bought at a discount to liquidation value.
Charlie Munger
Image
So, economics should emulate physics' basic ethos, but its search for precision in physics-like formulas is almost always wrong in economics.
Charlie Munger
Image
It's not a competency if you don't know the edge of it.
Charlie Munger
Image
Well the open-outcry auction is just made to turn the brain into mush: you've got social proof, the other guy is bidding, you get reciprocation tendency, you get deprival super-reaction syndrome, the thing is going away... I mean it just absolutely is designed to manipulate people into idiotic behavior.
Charlie Munger
Image
The SEC does way more good than harm - the last thing I would do is get rid of the SEC...if accounting were thoroughly fixed, a lot of other sins would go away. We're paying a huge price for deterioration of accounting.
Charlie Munger
Image
A Lesson on Elementary, Worldly Wisdom As It Relates To Investment Management & Business
Charlie Munger
Image
The old culture had come out of poverty, out of English customs.
Charlie Munger
Image
In investment management today, everybody wants not only to win, but to have a yearly outcome path that never diverges very much from a standard path except on the upside. Well, that is a very artificial, crazy construct. That's the equivalent in investment management to the custom of binding the feet of Chinese women
Charlie Munger
Image
I think the foundation at Berkshire [Buffett's stake in Berkshirewill pass to the Buffett Foundation upon his death] will be a plus because there will be a continuation of the culture. We'd still take in fine businesses run by people who love them.
Charlie Munger
Image
You must have the confidence to override people with more credentials than you whose cognition is impaired by incentive-caused bias or some similar psychological force that is obviously present. But there are also cases where you have to recognize that you have no wisdom to add - and that your best course is to trust some expert.
Charlie Munger
Image
Most people are too fretful, they worry to much. Success means being very patient, but aggressive when it's time.
Charlie Munger
Image
Litigation is notoriously time-consuming, inefficient, costly and unpredictable.
Charlie Munger
Image
Quoting Demosthenes, 'For what each man wishes, that he also believes to be true.' I would rather make money playing a piano in a whorehouse than arguing that no cost is incurred when employees are paid in stock options instead of cash. I am not kidding.
Charlie Munger
Image
The big money is not in the buying and selling ... but in the waiting.
Charlie Munger
Image
Intense interest in any subject is indispensable if you're really going to excel in it.
Charlie Munger
Image
Don't do cocaine. Don't race trains. And avoid AIDS situations.
Charlie Munger
Image
The safest way to get what you want is to deserve what you want.
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