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The general systems of money management [today] require people to pretend to do something they can't do and like something they don't. It's a terrible way to spend your life, but it's very well paid.

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
People
Money
Require
Today
Pretend
Wells
Systems
Well
Management
Something
Paid
Way
General
Life
Spend
Like
Terrible

More quotes by Charlie Munger

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If all you succeed in doing in life is getting rich by buying little pieces of paper, it's a failed life. Life is more than being shrewd in wealth accumulation.
Charlie Munger
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I believe in the discipline of mastering the best that other people have ever figured out. I don't believe in just sitting down and trying to dream it all up yourself. Nobody's that smart.
Charlie Munger
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Over the very long term, history shows that the chances of any business surviving in a manner agreeable to a company's owners are slim at best.
Charlie Munger
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Spend each day trying to be a little wiser than you were when you woke up.
Charlie Munger
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If (investing) weren't a little difficult, everybody would be rich.
Charlie Munger
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You have to know accounting. It's the language of practical business life. It was a very useful thing to deliver to civilization. I've heard it came to civilization through Venice which of course was once the great commercial power in the Mediterranean. However, double entry bookkeeping was a hell of an invention.
Charlie Munger
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I see almost no change in the price of the composite product that flows through Costco I don't feel sorry for the people who pay $27 million for an 8,000-square-foot condo in Manhattan. So inflation comes in places.
Charlie Munger
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I think there's an awful lot of twaddle and bullshit on EVA. The whole game is to turn retained earnings into more earnings. EVA has ideas about cost of capital that make no sense. Of course, if a company generates high returns on capital and can maintain this over time, it will do well. But the mental system as a whole does not work.
Charlie Munger
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It took us months of buying all the Coke stock we could to accumulate $1 billion worth - equal to 7% of the company. It's very hard to accumulate major positions.
Charlie Munger
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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
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Accounting is a big subject and there are huge forces in play. The entire momentum of existing thinking and existing custom is in a direction that allows terrible follies to happen, and the terrible follies have terrible consequences.
Charlie Munger
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If you have competence, you pretty much know its boundaries already. To ask the question (of whether you are past the boundary) is to answer it.
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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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
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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
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Mimicking the herd invites regression to the mean.
Charlie Munger
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You must force yourself to consider opposing arguments. Especially when they challenge your best loved ideas.
Charlie Munger
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The beauty of a financial institution is that there are a lot of ways to go to hell in a bucket. You can push credit too far, do a dumb acquisition, leverage yourself excessively - it's not just derivatives [that can bring about your downfall].
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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Three rules for a career: 1) Don’t sell anything you wouldn’t buy yourself 2) Don’t work for anyone you don’t respect and admire and 3) Work only with people you enjoy.
Charlie Munger