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We have a higher percentage of the intelligentsia engaged in buying and selling pieces of paper and promoting trading activity than in any past era. A lot of what I see now reminds me of Sodomand Gomorrah. You get activity feeding on itself, envy and imitation. It has happened in the past that there came bad consequences.

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
Paper
Eras
Intelligentsia
Pieces
Consequences
Percentage
Higher
Buying
Percentages
Came
Engaged
Reminds
Happened
Envy
Trading
Past
Selling
Promoting
Consequence
Feeding
Activity
Imitation

More quotes by Charlie Munger

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The investment game is getting more and more competitive.
Charlie Munger
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The best thing a human being can do is to help another human being know more.
Charlie Munger
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I don't spend much time regretting the past, once I've taken my lesson from it. I don't dwell on it.
Charlie Munger
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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
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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
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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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No wise pilot, no matter how great his talent and experience, fails to use his checklist.
Charlie Munger
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If you can get good at destroying your own wrong ideas, that is a great gift.
Charlie Munger
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A lot of share-buying, not bargain-seeking, is designed to prop stock prices up. Thirty to 40 years ago, it was very profitable to look at companies that were aggressively buying their own shares. They were motivated simply to buy below what it was worth.
Charlie Munger
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I think liberal art faculties at major universities have views that are not very sound, at least on public policy issues - they may know a lot of French however.
Charlie Munger
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You'll find many markets where bottlers of Pepsi and Coke both make a lot of money and many others where they destroy most of the profitability of the two franchises. That must get down to the peculiarities of individual adjustment to market capitalism. I think you 'd have to know the people involved to fully understand what was happening.
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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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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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's not the bad ideas that do you in, but the good ones.
Charlie Munger
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Someone will always be getting richer faster than you. This is not a tragedy.
Charlie Munger
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The whole concept of dividing it up into 'value' and 'growth' strikes me as twaddle. It's convenient for a bunch of pension fund consultants to get fees prattling about and a way for one advisor to distinguish himself from another. But, to me, all intelligent investing is value investing.
Charlie Munger
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In fact I've probably never seen such a wide moat.
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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The tax code gives you an enormous advantage if you can find some things you can just sit with.
Charlie Munger