Caproasia

Benjamin Graham

Investment is simple, but not easy.

It is absurd to think that the general public can ever make money out of market forecasts.

In the short run, the market is a voting machine, but in the long run it is a weighing machine.

In the world of securities, courage becomes the supreme virtue after adequate knowledge and a tested judgment are at hand.

To achieve satisfactory investment results is easier than most people realize; to achieve superior results is harder than it looks.

Those with enterprise lack the money and those with the money lack the enterprise to buy stocks when they are cheap.

The individual investor should act consistently as an investor and not as a speculator.

If you are shopping for common stocks, choose them the way you would buy groceries, not the way you would buy perfume

Without a saving faith in the future, no one would ever invest at all. To be an investor, you must be a believer in a better tomorrow.

A typical investor has a great advantage over the large institutions.

You can get in way more trouble with a good idea than a bad idea, because you forget that the good idea has limits.

Individuals who cannot master their emotions are ill-suited to profit from the investment process.

The underlying principles of sound investment should not alter from decade to decade, but the application of these principles must be adapted to significant changes in the financial mechanisms and climate.

Obvious prospects for physical growth in a business do not translate into obvious profits for investors.

The investor’s chief problem – and even his worst enemy – is likely to be himself.

All things excellent are as difficult as they are rare.

A great company is not a great investment if you pay too much for the stock.

You do not have to trade with him [Mr Market] just because he constantly begs you to.

There is no sure and easy path to riches in wall street or anywhere else.

The intelligent investor will not do his buying and selling solely on the basis of recommendations received from a financial service

Successful investing professionals are disciplined and consistent and they think a great deal about what they do and how they do it

In the end, what matters isn’t crossing the finishing line before anybody else. But just making sure that you do cross it.

Growth stocks are worth buying when their prices are reasonable.

Even the intelligent investor is likely to need considerable will power to keep from following the crowd.

Do not take yearly results too seriously. Instead, focus on four or five-year averages.

But on the very rare occasions when Mr. Market generates that many true bargains, you’re all but certain the make money.

Even the intelligent investor is likely to need considerable willpower to keep from following the crowd

True investment is more a hazard to be guarded against than as a source of profit through prophecy.

Wall Street people learn nothing and forget everything

The individual investor should act consistently as an investor and not as a speculator. This means.. that he should be able to justify every purchase he makes and each price he pays by impersonal, objective reasoning that satisfies him that he is getting more than his money’s worth for his purchase.

Most of the time stocks are subject to irrational and excessive price fluctuations in both directions as the consequence of the ingrained tendency of most people to speculate or gamble … to give way to hope, fear and greed.

They (stockbrokers, financial analysts, investment advisers) tend to take the market and themselves too seriously. They spend a large part of their time trying, valiantly and ineffectively, to do things they can’t do well.

When somebody asserts that a stock has an earning power of so much, I am sure that the person who hears him doesn’t know what he means, and there is a good chance that the man who uses it doesn’t know what it means.

The correct attitude of the security analyst toward the stock market might well be that of a man toward his wife. He shouldn’t pay too much attention to what the lady says, but he can’t afford to ignore it entirely. That is pretty much the position that most of us find ourselves vis-à-vis the stock market.

Investment is most intelligent when it is most businesslike.

Peter Lynch

Everyone has the brainpower to follow the stock market. If you made it through fifth-grade math, you can do it

Go for a business that any idiot can run – because sooner or later, any idiot probably is going to run it

Know what you own, and how why you own it.

Absent a lot of surprises, stocks are relatively predictable over twenty years. As to whether they’re going to be higher or lower in two to three years, you might as well flip a coin to decide.

If you stay half-alert, you can pick the spectacular performers right from your place of business or out of the neighborhood shopping mall, and long before Wall Street discovers them.

You get recessions, you have stock market declines. If you don’t understand that’s going to happen, then you’re not ready, you won’t do well in the markets.

Investing without research is like playing stud poker and never looking at the cards.

If you spend more than 13 minutes analyzing economic and market forecasts, you’ve wasted 10 minutes.

Investing is fun, exciting, and dangerous if you don’t do any work.

Never invest in any idea you can’t illustrate with a crayon.

The person that turns over the most rocks wins the game. And that’s always been my philosophy.

There are substantial rewards for adopting a regular routine of investing and following it no matter what, and additional rewards for buying more shares when most investors are scared into selling.

Everyone has the brainpower to make money in stocks. Not everyone has the stomach. If you are susceptible to selling everything in a panic, you ought to avoid stocks and mutual funds altogether.

Warren Buffett

Wall Street is the only place that people ride to in a Rolls Royce to get advice from those who take the subway

It’s far better to buy a wonderful company at a fair price than a fair company at a wonderful price

What we learn from history is that people don’t learn from history.

If you aren’t thinking about owning a stock for ten years, don’t even think about owning it for ten minutes.

A public-opinion poll is no substitute for thought.

You don’t need to be a rocket scientist. Investing is not a game where the guy with the 160 IQ beats the guy with 130 IQ.

You only have to do a few things right in your life so long as you don’t do too many things wrong

If past history was all there was to the game, the richest people who would be librarians

Only when the tide goes out do you discover who’s been swimming naked

A prediction about the direction of the stock market tells you nothing about where stocks are headed, but a whole lot about the person doing the predicting.

Someone’s sitting in the shade today because someone planted a tree a long time ago

It’s nice to have a lot of money, but you know, you don’t want to keep it around forever. I prefer buying things. Otherwise, it’s a little like saving sex for your old age.

It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it. If you think about that, you’ll do things differently.

The business schools reward difficult complex behavior more than simple behavior, but simple behavior is more effective.

When you combine ignorance and leverage, you get some pretty interesting results

I will tell you how to become rich. Close the doors. Be fearful when others are greedy. Be greedy when others are fearful.

With enough insider information and a million dollars, you can go broke in a year

We have long felt that the only value of stock forecasters is to make fortune-tellers look good.

No matter how great the talent or efforts, some things just take time. You can’t produce a baby in one month by getting nine women pregnant.

Buy a business, don’t rent stocks.

I never attempt to make money on the stock market. I buy on the assumption that they could close the market the next day and not reopen it for five years.

In the business world, the rearview mirror is always clearer than the windshield

Turnarounds seldom turn.

It is not necessary to do extraordinary things to get extraordinary results.

If you are in a poker game and after 20 minutes you don’t know who the patsy is, then you’re the patsy.

Time is the friend of the wonderful business, the enemy of the mediocre.

Rule No. 1: never lose money; rule No. 2: don’t forget rule No. 1

Derivatives are weapons of mass destruction.

For investors as a whole, returns decrease as motion increases.

A contrarian approach is just as foolish as a follow-the-crowd strategy.

Price is what you pay. Value is what you get

Risk comes from not knowing what you’re doing

Wide diversification is only required when investors do not understand what they are doing.

Shares are not mere pieces of paper. They represent part ownership of a business. So, when contemplating an investment, think like a prospective owner.

All there is to investing is picking good stocks at good times and staying with them as long as they remain good companies.

Investors should be skeptical of history-based models. Constructed by a nerdy-sounding priesthood using esoteric terms such as beta, gamma, sigma and the like, these models tend to look impressive. Too often, though, investors forget to examine the assumptions behind the models. Beware of geeks bearing formulas.

Games are won by players who focus on the playing field –- not by those whose eyes are glued to the scoreboard.

Opportunities come infrequently. When it rains gold, put out the bucket, not the thimble

To invest successfully, you need not understand beta, efficient markets, modern portfolio theory, option pricing or emerging markets. You may, in fact, be better off knowing nothing of these. That, of course, is not the prevailing view at most business schools, whose finance curriculum tends to be dominated by such subjects. In our view, though, investment students need only two well-taught courses – How to Value a Business, and How to Think About Market Prices.

We want to buy them when they’re on the operating table.

Over the long term, the stock market news will be good.

We never want to count on the kindness of strangers in order to meet tomorrow’s obligations.

After a heady experience of that kind, normally sensible people drift into behavior akin to that of Cinderella at the ball.

When we own portions of outstanding businesses with outstanding managements, our favorite holding period is forever.

The stock market is a no-called-strike game. You don’t have to swing at everything–you can wait for your pitch. The problem when you’re a money manager is that your fans keep yelling, ‘Swing, you bum!

I am a better investor because I am a businessman, and a better businessman because I am no investor.

We’ve used derivatives for many, many years. I don’t think derivatives are evil, per se, I think they are dangerous. …So we use lots of things daily that are dangerous, but we generally pay some attention to how they’re used. We tell the cars how fast they can go

Whether we’re talking about socks or stocks, I like buying quality merchandise when it is marked down.

Stop trying to predict the direction of the stock market, the economy or elections.

Only buy something that you’d be perfectly happy to hold if the market shut down for 10 years.

It’s better to hang out with people better than you. Pick out associates whose behavior is better than yours and you’ll drift in that direction.

I don’t look to jump over seven-foot bars; I look around for one-foot bars that I can step over.

If a business does well, the stock eventually follows

Why not invest your assets in the companies you really like? As Mae West said, ‘Too much of a good thing can be wonderful.

Look at market fluctuations as your friend rather than your enemy; profit from folly rather than participate in it.

Beware of geeks bearing formulas.

Buy companies with strong histories of profitability and with a dominant business franchise.

Risk can be greatly reduced by concentrating on only a few holdings.

The critical investment factor is determining the intrinsic value of a business and paying a fair or bargain price.

Unless you can watch your stock holding decline by 50% without becoming panic-stricken, you should not be in the stock market.

Great investment opportunities come around when excellent companies are surrounded by unusual circumstances that cause the stock to be mis-appraised.

A very rich person should leave his kids enough to do anything, but not enough to do nothing.

Much success can be attributed to inactivity. Most investors cannot resist the temptation to constantly buy and sell.

The advice ‘you never go broke taking a profit’ is foolish.

The Stock Market is designed to transfer money from the Active to the Patient.

By periodically investing in an index fund, the know-nothing investors can actually outperform most investment professionals.

In a commodity business, it’s very hard to be smarter than your dumbest competitor.

We like to buy businesses, but we don’t like to sell them.

A hyperactive stock market is the pickpocket of enterprise.

Valuing a business is part art and part science.

Americans are in a cycle of fear which leads to people not wanting to spend and not wanting to make investments, and that leads to more fear. We will break out of it. It takes time.

Chains of habit are too light to be felt until they are too heavy to be broken.

Risk is a part of God’s game, alike for men and nations.

I have no idea on timing. It is easier to tell what will happen than when it will happen. I would say that what is going on in terms of trade policy is going to have very important consequences.

You’re neither right nor wrong because other people agree with you. You’re right because your facts are right and your reasoning is right – that’s the only thing that makes you right. And if your facts and reasoning are right, you don’t have to worry about anybody else.

We believe that according the name ‘investors’ to institutions that trade actively is like calling someone who repeatedly engages in one-night stands a ‘romantic.’

When a management team with a reputation for brilliance joins a business with poor fundamental economics, it is the reputation of the business that remains intact.

Economic medicine that was previously meted out by the cupful has recently been dispensed by the barrel. These once unthinkable dosages will almost certainly bring on unwelcome after-effects. Their precise nature is anyone’s guess, though one likely consequence is an onslaught of inflation.

I always knew I was going to be rich. I don’t think I ever doubted it for a minute.

I made my first investment at age eleven. I was wasting my life up until then.

Donald Trump

Money was never a big motivation for me, except as a way to keep score. The real excitement is playing the game.

Experience taught me a few things. One is to listen to your gut, no matter how good something sounds on paper. The second is that you’re generally better off sticking with what you know. And the third is that sometimes your best investments are the ones you don’t make.

Sometimes your best investments are the ones you don’t make

Sometimes by losing a battle you find a new way to win the war

You have to think anyway, so why not think big?

Bill Gross

Finding the best person or the best organization to invest your money is one of the most important financial decisions you’ll ever make.

Do you really like a particular stock? Put 10% or so of your portfolio on it. Make the idea count. Good investment ideas should not be diversified away into meaningless oblivion.

If financial assets no longer work for you at a rate far and above the rate of true wealth creation, then you must work longer for your money

Americans now know that housing prices can go down and they can go down by 10, 20, 30 and in some cases, 40 or 50 percent. We know they can go down. But five years ago, we thought they could only go up.

George Soros

If investing is entertaining, if you’re having fun, you’re probably not making any money. Good investing is boring.

It is not whether you are right or wrong that is important, but how much money you make when you are right and how much you lose when you are wrong

Volatility is greatest at turning points, diminishing as a new trend becomes established

I rely a great deal on animal instincts.

Playing by the rules, one does the best he can, irrespective of the social consequences. Whereas in making the rules, people ought to be concerned with the social consequences and not with their personal interests.

George opened all of our thinking to macroeconomic theory, and he made globalists of us all by making us understand the importance of geopolitical events on the U.S. economy. (Byron Wien, Morgan Stanley)

My approach works not by making valid predictions but by allowing me to correct false ones.

The secret to my success is that I know that I will be wrong. I consider it strength to admit my mistakes. That allows me to stay in the game and fight another day.

An open society is a society which allows its members the greatest possible degree of freedom in pursuing their interests compatible with the interests of others.

Bush’s war in Iraq has done untold damage to the United States. It has impaired our military power and undermined the morale of our armed forces. Our troops were trained to project overwhelming power. They were not trained for occupation duties.

I am not doing my philanthropic work, out of any kind of guilt, or any need to create good public relations. I’m doing it because I can afford to do it, and I believe in it.

Carl Icahn

I make money. Nothing wrong with that. That’s what I want to do. That’s what I’m here to do. That’s what I enjoy.

CEOs are paid for doing a terrible job. If the system wasn’t so messed up, guys like me wouldn’t make this kind of money.

When most investors, including the pros, all agree on something, they’re usually wrong.

In life and business, there are two cardinal sins, the first is to act precipitously without thought, and the second is to not act at all. Unfortunately the board of directors and top management of Times Warner already committed the first sin by merging with AOL, and we believe they are currently in the process of committing the second; now is not a time to move slowly and suffer the paralysis of inaction.

You learn in this business: It you want a friend, get a dog

I believe there are and will be major opportunities to enhance Time Warner’s value in future combinations. However these transactions might not be achievable if Time Warner enters into long-term arrangements that preclude future flexibility such as an agreement regarding search functionality.

We’re not about liquidating companies. But if you do that, why is that terrible? We’re not blowing up the factories. The person who buys it should be able to make the asset more productive.

We have bloated bureaucracies in Corporate America. The root of the problem is the absence of real corporate democracy.

A great company in the media business needs visionary leaders, not a conglomerate structure headquartered in Columbus Circle that second guesses.

Too often it’s not the most creative guys or the smartest. Instead, the ones are best at playing politics and soft-soaping their bosses. Boards don’t like tough, abrasive guys.

John Bogle

Don’t look for the needle in the haystack. Just buy the haystack!

Time is your friend; impulse is your enemy.

If you have trouble imaging a 20% loss in the stock market, you shouldn’t be in stocks.

When reward is at its pinnacle, risk is near at hand

The grim irony of investing, then, is that we investors as a group not only don’t get what we pay for, we get precisely what we don’t pay for. So if we pay for nothing, we get everything.

In 1980, the compensation of the average chief executive officer was forty-two times that of the average worker; by the year 2004, the ratio had soared to 280 times that of the average worker (down from an astonishing 531 times at the peak in 2000). Over the past quarter-century, CEO compensation measured in current dollars rose nearly sixteen times over , while the compensation of the average worker slightly more than doubled. Measured in real(1980) dollars, however, the compensation of the average worker rose just 0.3 percent per year, barely enough to maintain his or her standard of living. Yet CEO compensation rose at a rate of 8.5 percent annually, increasing by more than seven times in real terms during the period. The rationale was that these executives had “created wealth” for their shareholders. But were CEOs actually creating value commensurate with this huge increase in compenstion? Certainly the average CEO was not. In real terms, aggregate corporate profits grew at an annual rate of just 2.9 percent, compared to 3.1 percent for our nation’s economy, as represented by the Gross Domestic Product. How that somewhat dispiriting lag can drive average CEO compensation to a cool 9.8 million in 2004 is one of the great anomalies of the age.

On balance, the financial system subtracts value from society.

The mutual fund industry has been built, in a sense, on witchcraft.

Aristotle Onassis

The secret of business is to know something that nobody else knows.

After a certain point, money is meaningless. It ceases to be the goal. The game is what counts.

The more you own, the more you know you don’t own.

Behind every millionaire hides a frenzied borrower.

If woman didn’t exist, all the money in the world would have no meaning

To my mind, the world is just too small. I don’t need a university degree. One day what I do will astonish you.

You usually find that if you make things comfortable for people they like you.

You will usually discover that if you make things easier for people, you gain their sympathy.

The crisis is all part of the game.

My mother died when I was six. If she had lived, I might not have worked as hard as I have done.

If you’re short, take a loan. Never ask for a small amount. Ask for what you need, and always pay it back, the sooner the better

If an individual is mediocre today, he can get away with it. If he’s outstandingly successful, he comes suspect.

Outstanding individualism aggravates and disturbs the rest of society.

In business we cut each other’s throats, but now and then we sit around the same table and behave – for the sake of the ladies.

It is during our darkest moments that we must focus to see the light.

Be rich or be an enemy of the rich. I understand both. But never envy the rich and try to please them.

People forget quickly. Only a few weeks earlier they have been on the verge of death. Then safety and the grumbles can complaints begin – over all sorts of trivialities.

If you aspire for success, do not squander your time reading about things others have done. It is better to get on living your own life than to concern yourself with what others have done. This rule applies strongly to all the stories about me, Jackie and my friends. If a quarter of what reporters have written about me were true, I would already be ruined, abandoned, and so depressed by my misadventures that I would be on the point of shooting myself.

The rules are … there are no rules.

Bernard Madoff

Wall Street is one big turf war .. by benefiting one person you are disadvantaging another person

Don’t let Wall Street scam you, like I did. If the investment looks too good to be true, it is

Robert Kiyosaki

An investment needs to make sense today and tomorrow.

Opportunities repeat themselves because people repeat the same mistakes.

One of the ways to find great investments is to become an expert on the mistakes that other investors make.

Many financial advisors recommend that you diversify for your own protection. What they fail to tell you is that it is also for their protection. Since most financial advisors cannot tell you exactly which stock or mutual fund is a great investment, they tell you to buy a bunch of them.

If you don’t like the idea that most of the money spent on lottery tickets supports government programs, you should know that most of the earnings from mutual funds support investment advisors’ and mutual fund managers’ retirement.

People don’t like the idea of thinking long term. Many are desperately seeking short term answers because they have money problems to be solved today

Investing is a continual process of searching, negotiating, financial and managing people and money.

Building or owning a business is by far the most rewarding but also the most stressful of all the three asset classes.

The stock market dominates the investment market for a period of twenty years. As the twentieth year approaches, the possibility of a market crash increases. After the crash, the stock market tends to stay down for ten years. During the ten years the stock market is down, commodities such as gold, silver, oil and property dominate the investment world. And every five years, there is some kind of major disaster.

The best part of playing the game of money, regardless of whether I was winning or losing, is that I got better at the game.

Teaching is one of the best ways of learning.

Prepare for bad times and you will only know good times.

Many people are financially struggling today because they are simply too slow – they cannot make money faster than the banks are printing it. When it comes to financial transactions, most people are still in the stone age, getting paid by the hour, by the month, or per transaction, working for commissions, as is the case with real estate agents or stock brokers. Those who will succeed in the future will be entrepreneurs who understand how quickly business and money are changing, and who have the ability and flexibility to quickly change and adapt.

My poor dad was crushed by the new economy. He choose financial security rather than financial freedom – and in the end, he had neither.

Today, businesses can do more business with fewer employees and thus become more profitable.

This is the best of times for those willing to study, learn quickly, work hard … learn from the past to succeed in the future.

If you are going to be financially secure, you need to learn to have more cash flowing into your pockets.

Rather than use net worth, I use cashflow to measure my wealth. The money my investments bring in every month is true wealth – not some perceived notion of value that may or may not be true.

The secret to Rich Dad’s success was that he invested for cashflow.

Investing for capital gains is gambling.

Invest for cashflow and you’ll never worry about money. Invest for cashflow, and you will not be wiped out in boom and bust markets. Invest for cashflow and you’ll be a rich man.

Don’t let greed and easy money interfere with becoming a rich and financially wise man. Never confuse capital gains with cashflow.

Rich people have money. Wealthy people have time

Cashflow investing requires more financial sophistication. Anyone can buy something and hope the price will increase. Finding cash-flowing deals take knowledge of both potential income and expenses, and how to project the performance of the investment based on those variables.

If you want to change your life, begin by changing your words, and the best news of all is that words are free.

The concept ‘Live below your means’ keeps many people financially poor, emotionally empty, and spiritually neutral.

Were is not for his dreams, my rich dad would never have become a rich man.

Take away a person’s dreams, and you take away their life.

Rather than live below my means, rich dad reminded me constantly to push the boundaries of my life. Even when I was short on money, I still drove a nice car and lived in a beachfront condo. Rich dad’s advice was never to think, look or act like a poor person. He constantly reminded me that ‘the world treats you as you treat yourself.’

When you don’t have money, think and use your head. Never give in to the poor person inside of you.

Why live below your means when an abundant and full life is within your reach.

In the world of money the rich are sellers and the poor and middle class are buyers

Focus more on selling and less on buying. The reason so many millions of people are in financial trouble is because they love to buy and hate to sell. If you want to be rich, you must sell much more than you buy. This does not mean you should live below your means. Rather than live below your means, learn to sell, and you can expand your means and go for your dreams. If you sell more than you buy, you will not have to live below your means or cling to job security.

If a person’s life lacks integrity and is out of alignment with his mission in life, problems will occur.

The road to success is always under construction.

Expanding your means rather than living below your means.

We can change ourselves by changing the way we think and what we study.

The primary reason most people are afraid of changing is because they are afraid of making mistakes.

It is hard to feel like a loser as long as cash is flowing into your pockets even if your asset price has depreciated.

One reason why financially educated people want to keep their money moving is because if they park their money in one asset class, as many amateur investors do, they may lose their money when cash flows out of that asset class.

Legal advice that prevents you from getting into trouble with the law is always less expensive than legal advice once you are in trouble.

As I’ve travelled, I’ve compared Americans to people in the emerging nations. I’ve noticed a market difference in intensity and attitude towards learning about money. Rather than focus on financial education, most Americans focus on going back to school to get a high paying job… at the same time our jobs are being exported to lower wage countries.

Most of us know that goals are important. I’m sure that most of us know that people who make the effort to write down their goals are more successful than people who don’t. If this is true, I wonder why people don’t focus more on their goals? I believe the spiritual nature of goal setting has allowed Kim and I to live a life far beyond our wildest dreams.

The rich will spot the opportunities, while the poor will hide their heads and pretend it isn’t happening. Can you spot opportunities that may arise from these economic changes?

The greatest fear in America today is running out of money during retirement.

Everyone has money problems. If you want to make yourself rich, solve problems. Identifying a problem creates the opportunity for creating a solution.

Those who haven’t learned from history are destined to repeat it.

Many also believe that to get higher returns means you have to take on more risk. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Are you stubborn enough to be a winner?

The difference between a saver and an investor, there is one word that separates them, and that word is leverage. One definition of leverage is the ability to do more with less.

Most savers do not use financial leverage.

The government wants us to create jobs… not look for a job. Our economy would collapse if everyone started looking for a job. For our economy to grow, we need people to create jobs.

Use your mind to make money… and not to take excuses.

Excuses are a dime a dozen. That’s why unsuccessful people have so many excuses. If you cannot control your mind, you cannot control your life.

I continue my financial education via real-life experience and by having great mentors as well as great advisors. I love learning about money, business, finance and wealth. I will probably be a student until the day I die. I do not think I will ever feel I know enough, or that my cup is full or that I have all the answers. I can always learn more and love doing so.

It is the search for the answer – the answer I may never find – that makes me rich. It is the search that keeps me going, getting richer and not retiring, even though I have the money to retire on. You see it is not the quest for money that makes me rich. It is the quest for knowledge. It is the desire to learn more, do more, accomplish more and help those who want to learn that drives me… and money is just the score, a measure to tell me how we are doing. Money is the celebration of success, just as the lack of money is the reminder that we need to learn more. Just as a traveller watches for mile markers, I look at money simply as a marker – a market that measures the journey and distance travelled.

People who invest to win are also very careful about whom they take financial education from.

A true investor buys to own the investment and pass it on for generations.

Combat is not risky. Being unprepared is risky. I practice to reduce risk. I improve my skills to reduce risk. I study to reduce risk. If I need to take a risk, I take a small one.

Most people invest money and do not invest much time. Donald [Trump] and I invest a lot of time before we invest much money. We prepare to invest. I realised that entrepreneurship is not risky. Being unprepared is risky.

Once my thoughts and attitude changed, my actions changed, and so did my result.

Be as wise as a serpent and as gentle as a dove.

It is easier to be healthy if you are happy. It is easier to be wealthy if you are happy. And it is easier to be happy if you are in love with what you are doing.

In my environment today money is not a dirty word. Getting rich is fun, and investing is a game. Rather than living below our means, we constantly work on expanding our means, increasing our income, building assets and serving as many people as we can. Also we keep financially negative people out of our lives and surround ourselves with like-minded people who challenge and support us. Our friends are also a part of our environment.

To be a true entrepreneur, you need to be smart and love to learn. If you do not love learning, chances are your business will not grow… because you are not growing. Whenever I find a business that is declining or stagnant, it is often because the owner is declining or stagnant.

Focus, focus, focus. All people who have achieved greatness have been very focused people.

There is no correlation between a realestate agent licence and the business of real estate investing. Most agents are not rich.

I realised that most people were not rich simply because of fear.

For many people, the fear of failing is more powerful than the joy of winning.

It is not the mistake that is the sin… it is not learning from mistakes that is the sin.

Your genius is found when you find a way to accomplish what you need to accomplish, in spite of what you lack. Have the courage to find your way of getting things done.

When you learn from the mistake you enter a whole new world of knowing and understanding. If you deny, lay blame, justify, or fail to be responsible for your learning, the gates of new wisdom do not open to you.

Focus on teaching those you can, rather than those you can’t . (You can’t teach a pig how to sing.)

Teach those you can teach. Be kind and treat with respect those you can’t. Learn from those you can’t teach, how to become a better teacher, but never force someone who doesn’t want to learn to learn.

To turn coal into a diamond requires heat and pressure.
Games are a reflection of behaviour.

You cannot teach a poor person to be rich. You can only teach a person who wants to learn to be rich to be rich.

Always remember that there are two kinds of pain… good pain and bad pain. The reason most people are not rich is simply because they do not want to go through the good pain. Many people are in bad financial pain simply because they avoid the good pain. Eg. 1) Constant financial struggle 2) Living below one’s means and a low standard of living 3) Living above one’s means… keeping up with the Joneses 4) Chronically saying ‘I can’t afford it’ 5) Worrying about money 6) Always in debt… bad debt 7) Saving for tomorrow but not living today.

There are many poor people with lots of money.

Most people spend their health to gain wealth. Then they spend their wealth trying to get back their health

What intelligence really is 1) The ability to improve survivability 2) The ability to solve problems 3) The ability to learn something you do not want to do but need to do.

One of the most important reasons for increasing your financial intelligence is to be able to solve bigger financial problems.

Joy is a more powerful motivator than fear.

The best way to know the difference between good experts and bad experts is to become an expert yourself.

Getting rich has little to do with money or formal education. Getting rich has everything to do with desire, drive, determination, study, friends, advisors, and how bad you want to be rich. It’s easy to be a rich expert in your own backyard.

When people ask why we keep working when we no longer have to, the reason is because our work gives our lives means. Work is our passion. Work helps fulfil our life purpose and it gives our lives meaning because we believe our work is important and vital.

Anyone can be rich by being greedy. Having a high financial IQ means knowing how to be a generous person.

If you teach yourself and others to be rich, you can become richer, regardless of how big or small your paycheck is.

The secret to becoming richer was simply teaching others what I wanted to learn.

You cannot teach a poor person to be rich. You can only teach someone who wants to learn to be rich, to be rich. Many people want money but very few people want to learn to be rich. That is why there are so few rich people.

In July of 2005 the government of Japan informed it’s younger workers that they will have to pay more in taxes to pay for the older workers’ retirement. We in America may be getting the same news in a few years.

You will not become rich until you teach others to be rich.

Was that why he was rich? In teaching me to be rich was he also teaching himself to be richer? ‘Of course. I’m not doing this just for you, I’m doing this for me. I learn something everytime I teach. We may not be learning the same things, but I too am learning. There have been many a time I’ve been teaching you or Mike and suddenly a new idea pops into my head, or I see something completely differently. There has been many a time I have solved my own problems helping you solve your own problems.’

Teach what you want to learn.

The more I teach, the more I learn. The more I learn, the better teacher I become.

The purpose is to be a student who teaches other students to be free from the slavery of money and from those who seek to control their money.

Passion is essential for success.

Everytime I find myself having difficulty solving a problem, be it a financial, business, or personal problem, I remind myself of his [Einstein –‘Imagination is more important than knowledge.’] and shift to the use of my imagination. I have come to realise that problems are only symptoms of rational thinking and an uncreative mind. In other words, the only reason a problem is a problem is because I am using and old solution to solve a new problem. To solve a new problem requires imagination, intuition, faith, and a love of adventure.

Every professional investor knows they will occasionally make a mistake and make a bad investment. So professionals know that cutting your losses, as early as possible, is always a strategic option you keep in your bag of tricks. People who need to be right or refuse to admit they made a mistake, often hold onto their losses, refusing to let go. The tricky part is to know when it it’s time to cut your losses. Some people quit too early, some quit too late, and some never quit at all. Amateurs tend to hold onto losers forever because they don’t want to admit they made a mistake.

Anyone can work hard for money. It takes a person with a high financial IQ to have their money work hard.

Being generous, rather than greedy, is one of the better ways of getting rich.

As long as I have cashflowing in, I can sleep at night, whether the market is going up or going down.

Watch the historical, long-trends, have a big picture view, and be patient.

Humans need to give.

I don’t know a successful person alive who didn’t also fail a lot at the beginning. The fear of failure is always lurking in the background of the mind, waiting to sabotage one’s success. If you pretend it’s not there, you can’t deal with it. Acknowledge it. Then move forward and do your best.

Knowledge + ACTION = Results.

Many lazy people are hard-working people.

It is easier to be busy at work than it was to do what I needed to do.

My rich dad was a rich man because he did not work hard for money. Instead he worked hard at having his money work hard for him. The harder his money worked, the more money he made, and the more free time he had. The more free time he had, the more money he made.

See what most people cannot see. See opportunities most people cannot see because of fear. See the destination and the journey.

One of the reasons I have a team of advisors when I invest is simply that each person sees something different. After listening to what each person has to say, I then make up my own mind.

How many investments can you afford if you lose money each month?

I get richer by failing. I found out that people who do not fail also do not succeed.

People are trainable. They can be trained to be either employees or entrepreneurs.

If you want freedom you need to let go of security. Employees desire security and entrepreneurs seek freedom.

‘So the secret to your business success is being willing to make mistakes and then learning from them?’ Yes. That is my job as an entrepreneur. My job is to set new goals, create a plan, make mistakes and risk failing. The more mistakes I make, the smarter I become and hopefully the company grows and prospers from the lessons learned.

I start new businesses even if I succeed. That is why I have so many businesses, business that run without me. That is my secret to great wealth. Most employees have one job. As an entrepreneur, I have multiple businesses.

Don’t ask yourself why? Ask yourself why not?

Work to learn, not to earn.

Sometimes we win the most when we have nothing to lose.

Success reveals your failures.

Each failure was actually making me smarter and more confident. Each failure made me less afraid of failing and more excited about learning what I needed to learn next. Each failure was a challenge, the door to the next world. If I was successful, the door to the next world opened. If I failed and the challenge beat me, the door slammed in my face. If the door slammed in my face, it meant I needed to get smarter. I needed to think harder. I needed to use my creativity to find a way to get into the next door. In many ways, it was like being a salesman on the street again, knocking on doors once more.

How can I serve more people? Ironically, I have made more money focusing on serving more people rather than focusing on how to make more money.

One of the big differences between an S [Self employed] and B [Business] quadrant person is the number of customer they can handle. If you want to be rich, simply serve more people.

The most successful businesses usually do one of two things a) Solve a problem or b) Fill a need.

In my reality a winner also know when to quit. Sometimes in life, it is best to cut your losses. It is best to admit you have come to a dead end or to admit you have been barking up the wrong tree.

In my opinion, a quitter is someone who quits simply because things have gotten tough.

You can always quit. Why start now?

Be optimistic as well as brutally honest with yourself.

Since the banks can print money, why can’t you?

In spite of rising unemployment and the loss of traditionally safe jobs, like a monkey clinging to his fruits and nuts, people are returning back to school to train for a new job, higher pay, benefits and a good pension plan.

Two objects cannot occupy the same space at the same time. For example you cannot have two cars in a one-car garage. The same is true with thoughts and ideas.

Taking action is important because we learn by our mistakes. The idea that mistakes are bad is a bad idea. If people do not make mistakes, they fail to learn. Which is why my poor dad remained poor.

With high-quality financial education, money flows in rather than out.

Start small, dream big.

Know that you will make mistakes, so make small mistakes, learn and keep dreaming big.

In the world of money and financial education, cashflow is the single most important world. Cash is always flowing. It is either flowing in, or it is flowing out. For most people, they work hard and the cash flows out. True financial education trains you to have cash flowing in. Financially educated investors must know the difference between cashflow and capital gains. Most uneducated investors invest for capital gains.

You have to be very smart to invest for cashflow.

As a couple, what is our unfair advantage? First, we set our financial goals together. Second, we study and we learn together in order to achieve the goal’s we’ve set.

There is a lot of truth to the old saying: Birds of a feather flock together. In my experience, people in different quadrants do not like people in other quadrants. Different quadrants attract different people, generally people with the same values and attitudes.

Tax laws… these are not inadvertent loopholes in the law we are talking about. They are intentional benefits for business owners and investors.

Kim and I invest 90% of the time for cash flow, aka passive income. When we do invest for capital gains, aka portfolio income, we are extremely cautious, because we know it is gambling.

Cash must keep flowing.

I was facing the nightmare that keeps most investors out of real estate: property management and negative cash flow.

Remember it is not the asset class that determines if something (a house, boat, business, oil or gold) is an asset or a liability. What determines if something is an asset is the direction of the cashflow. If cashflows into your pocket it’s an asset. If cashflows out of your pocket, it’s a liability.

This is our objective: We want our down payment back, a free asset, free cashflow and tax breaks.

Value is always based on the net cash flow.

In their avoidance of risk, people lead lives of extreme risk.

Weaker currency means inflation at home.

There is no such thing as a safe investment. There are only smart investors.

Today, there are more mutual-fund companies than there are publicly traded companies.

Betting your future on the ups and downs of any market is risky, very risky.

The more you know about the different asset classes, the more your control goes up and your risk goes down.

The ability to sell, manage debt, and analyse market trends is essential to all four asset classes.

Sales equals income. If you want more income, learn to sell.

A business creates most of the truly wealthy people, but a business takes the most financial education. Real estate requires the second highest financial education. Paper assets are easy to get into, but are the riskiest.

The rich don’t work for money. They focus on assets that produce cashflow in good times or bad.

The rich focus on the asset column. They know if they focus on assets first, expenses and liabilities will be handled.

Today when we want a new liability, may be a new car or vacation house, all we have to do is acquire or develop an asset first, and that asset will pay for the liability.

Entrepreneurs turn problems into profits.

The only difference between the world monkey and money is the letter ‘k’ which stands for ‘knowledge’, or in the case of the monkey, the lack of knowledge. Without knowledge, there is not much difference between a monkey with money and a monkey without money.

Five things happen to people who do not invest, or who invest poorly: 1) They work hard all their lives 2) They worry about money all their lives 3) They depend on others, such as family, a company pension, or the government to take care of them 4) The boundaries of their lives are defined by money 5) They will not know what true freedom is.

Investing is not risky. Investing is fun. Investing can make you very very rich. More importantly investing can set you free, free from the struggle of earning a living and worrying about money.

The reality is that real investors do not park their money. They move their money. It is a strategy known as the ‘velocity of money’. A true investor’s money is always moving, acquiring new assets, and then moving on to acquire even more assets. Only amateurs park their money.

As long as you have more cash flowing in than flowing out, your investment is a good investment.

If you are a true investor, it does not matter if the markets are going up or going down. A true investor does well in any market condition.

In many ways, learning from my mistakes and taking responsibility for my mistakes was the best education I could have asked for. If I had not learned from my mistakes I would not be where I am today.

True capitalists are generous because a B [Business] quadrant capitalist knows you must give more to receive more.

The moment a person know how to make money out of nothing or with other people’s money or a bank’s money, they enter a different world. It’s a world almost an exactly opposite the world of those in the E [Employee] and S [Self-employed] quadrants where they experience hard work, high taxes, and low returns on investment.

When do you need a coach? When I know I need to be pushed, held accountable, challenged to go beyond my resistance, my laziness, my limitations, I hire a coach – if what I want is important to me.

If you are a strong leader, you can hire people smarter and better trained than you are.

Success requires discipline.

Give more to receive more.

Learn more so you can do more. Focus on doing more with less, and enriching the lives of others.

Money alone does not solve your money problems,. That is why giving poor people money does not solve their money problems. In many cases, it only prolongs the problem and creates more poor people.

Money problems make you smarter… if you solve your money problems, your financial intelligence grows. When your financial intelligence grows, you become richer. If you do not solve your money problem, you become poorer. If you do not solve your money problem, that problem often grows into more problems. If you want to increase your financial intelligence you need to be a problem solver. If you don’t solve your money problems you will never be rich. In fact, you will become poorer the longer the problem persists.

The rich get richer because they learn to solve financial problems. The rich see financial problems as opportunities to learn to grow, to become smarter and to become richer. The rich know that the higher their financial IQ, the bigger the problem they, can handle, hence the more money they make. Instead of running, avoiding, or pretending money problems do not exist, the rich welcome financial problems because they know that problems are opportunities to become smarter. That is why they get richer.

When the rich have money problems, they use their financial integrity… to solve those problems. If the rich don’t know the answer to their money problems, they don’t walk away and throw in the towel. They seek out experts who can help them solve their problems. In the process, they become financially more intelligent and are that much more equipped to solve the next problem when it comes around. The rich don’t quit. They learn. And by learning they grow richer.

Business, investing and making money is my game. I love my game. I am passionate about the game. So if I retired, I would lose my passion and what is life without passion?

Solving the problem was the path to wealth. You can quit when you win, but never quit because you’re losing.

If and when I solved this problem, I would never need money again.

In other works, we swallowed our pride and did whatever it took to make the extra money.

While I do occasionally flip a property, especially if someone is willing to pay me a ridiculous price for it, as a practice I would rather buy a property and collect rent and other income for a long time. Then I look for another property to buy and hold.

In real estate, many investors love triple net leases (NNN). With NNN’s investors receive income without the expenses of taxes, repairs and insurance. The tenant covers these costs.

As they say in the world of finance, ‘I’ll give you your price, if you will give me my terms.

Henry Ford build his auto plant in Detroit because he could buy large tracts of rocky, unfertile, non-agricultural land for a great price.

Generally a person who invests for capital gains is investing on an opinion. A cash flow investor invests for facts. If possible a smart investor will invest using both opinion and facts, and invest for both cashflow and capital gains.

Intelligence is the ability to take information and make it meaningful.

Everytime I see developers’ construction cranes sitting on high-rise condos I know the end of the trend is near. Whenever you see construction cranes, aka birds of prey, sitting on the skyline, you know the boom is about to bust. It means that the cycle has peaked, and generally, there is nowhere to go but down. The next time you see more than two construction cranes on the skyline, start selling any piece of real estate you do not want.

The good news is that problems ahead will make us smarter if we take them on with courage, and do not run from them. Inside every problem is a gem of wisdom, a gem that makes us smarter, stronger and able to do better regardless of economic conditions.

‘A’ students work for the ‘C’ students, and ‘B’ students work for the government.

I learned that if I did not feel good about myself, people did not feel good about me. In many instances, another person is only sending back what I am broadcasting. In other words, if I think I am a loser, other people will think of me as a loser. The good news is that you and I can change their perceptions of us by changing our perceptions of ourselves. For example, if I had not changed my perception of myself, I would never have met and married a beautiful woman like Kim, someone like Donald Trump wouldn’t be my friend, and I wouldn’t be financially secure today.

Entrepreneurs have two characteristics… ignorance and courage.

One of the reasons so many ‘A’ students are not rich is because they may be smart but lack courage. There are many people who lack both knowledge and courage.

In the real world, courage is more important than good grades. It takes courage to discover, develop and donate your genius to the world.

A good friend of mine, who has been a venture capitalist for over fifty years, always says, ‘The rich don’t buy stocks; they sell stocks.’ The rich create companies and then sell the company’s shares to investors. That is legally printing money.

The rich invent money.

Work to learn – don’t work for money.

Texans don’t bury their failures. They get inspired by them. They take their failures and turn them into rallying cries. Failure inspires Texans to become winners. But that formula is not just the formula for Texans. It is the formula for all winners.

Pay yourself first.

The poor and the middle class work for money. The rich have money work for them.

Your home is not an asset.

Benjamin Graham
Investment is simple, but not easy

Warren Buffett
Everyone has the brainpower to follow the stock market. If you made it through fifth-grade math, you can do it

Carl Icahn
You learn in this business: If you want a friend, get a dog

Jean Paul Getty
If you owe the bank $100, that’s your problem. If you owe the bank $100 million, that’s the bank’s problem.

Mark Cuban
The number one job of the hedge fund manager is not to make sure that you can retire with a smile on your face. It’s for him to retire with a smile on his face

Philip Fisher
Usually a very long list of securities is not a sign of the brilliant investor, but of one who is unsure of himself

Peter Lynch
What we learn from history is that people don’t learn from history

Aristotle Onassis
If woman didn’t exist, all the money in the world would have no meaning

Jack Yelton
There is a very easy way to return from a casino with a small fortune: go there with a large one

Joe Louis
I don’t like money, actually, but it quiets my nerves

Oscar Wilde
When I was young, I thought that money was the most important thing in life; now that I am old I know that it is

UnknownA father is someone who carries pictures in his wallet where his money used to be