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After nearly making a terrible mistake not buying See's, we've made this mistake many times. We are apparently slow learners. These opportunity costs don't show up on financial statements, but have cost us many billions.

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
Show
Buying
Times
Nearly
Opportunity
Billions
Making
Slow
Shows
Financial
Learners
Many
Cost
Apparently
Made
Terrible
Costs
Mistake
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More quotes by Charlie Munger

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I regard it as very unfair, but capitalism without failure is like religion without hell.
Charlie Munger
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Develop into a lifelong self-learner through voracious reading cultivate curiosity and strive to become a little wiser every day.
Charlie Munger
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In engineering, people have a big margin of safety. But in the financial world, people don't give a damn about safety. They let it balloon and balloon and balloon. It's aided by false accounting.
Charlie Munger
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I did not succeed in life by intelligence. I succeeded because I have a long attention span.
Charlie Munger
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We have found in a long life that one competitor is frequently enough to ruin a business.
Charlie Munger
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Almost all good businesses engage in 'pain today, gain tomorrow' activities.
Charlie Munger
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It's been my experience in life if you just keep thinking and reading, you don't have to work.
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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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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The tax code gives you an enormous advantage if you can find some things you can just sit with.
Charlie Munger
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The big money is not in the buying and selling ... but in the waiting.
Charlie Munger
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Intelligent people make decisions based on opportunity costs.
Charlie Munger
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A board member should be perfectly willing to leave at any time and willing to make the tough calls.
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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They [Mc Donalds] take people and give them a first job, which enables them to get a second job. They do a very good job of educating troubled young people to be good citizens and they're probably more successful than charter schools.
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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It's natural that you'd have more brains going into money management. There are so many huge incomes in money management and investment banking - it's like ants to sugar. There are huge incentives for a man to take up money management as opposed to, say, physics, and it's a lot easier.
Charlie Munger
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Great investing requires a lot of delayed gratification.
Charlie Munger
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I think gold is a great thing to sew onto your garments if you're a Jewish family in Vienna in 1939, but civilized people don't buy gold, they invest in productive businesses.
Charlie Munger
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It is an unfortunate fact that great and foolish excess can come into prices of common stocks in the aggregate. They are valued partly like bonds, based on roughly rational projections of use value in producing future cash. But they are also valued partly like Rembrandt paintings, purchased mostly because their prices have gone up, so far.
Charlie Munger