Investment and Life Lessons - Part 7

Here's the PART 7 of my previous posts regarding the lessons I've encountered in my various readings on business, stocks, economy, money, war, love and life. My list is getting too long again hence I'm sharing it with the Filipino Investors out there for them to learn a thing or two. Cheers!

1. Business shall always supersede politics, because Business is the main reason why we have politics - Daniel Cruz
2. Ego = 1/Knowledge
3. Good judgement comes from experience; Experience comes from bad judgement ~ Barry Lepatner
4. 33% of your life will be spent sleeping. Wouldn't it be amazing if you could make money while asleep?
5. A handful of patience is worth a bushel of brains - Dutch Proverb
6. Without a sense of urgency, desire loses its value - Jim Rohn
7. God gave me a tail to keep off the flies. But I'd rather have had no tail and no flies - Benjamin the Donkey quoted by Jim Simons
8. Be the hardest working person on what you do - Stephen Curry
9. The way for us to get there is to stay in the moment - Stephen Curry
10. Better yourself everyday - Stephen Curry
11. Be yourself, be humble and be grateful for all the blessings in your life - Stephen Curry
12. Action speaks louder than words - Stephen Curry
    
13. Never underestimate the Philippines or the Filipino - Aurelio Montinola
14. I made my first investment at age eleven. I was wasting my life up until then. - Warren Buffett
15. We make peace with our enemies, not our friends - Clever man quoted by Tyrion Lannister
16. Make the size of your positions big enough to potentially change your life, but not at the expense of a good night sleep. Find that balance.
17. You can’t think and hit at the same time - Yogi Berra
18. A gold-mine is just a hole in the ground with a liar at the top
    ~ Mark Twain
19. Very little is needed for a happy life - Marcus Aurelius
20. 'Nature does not hurry, yet everything is accomplished.' - Lao Tzu
21. Control your tongue, tailor your words, conceal your intentions
22. Whatever side I take, I know well that I shall be blamed - Louis XIV of France
23. I shall see - Louis XIV of France
24. I could sooner reconcile all Europe than two women - Louis XIV
25. In the end your helpers will be forgotten and you will be remembered - 48 laws of power
26. Use the knowledge of the past
27. Fools say that they learn from experience, I prefer to profit from other’s experience
28. If you cannot have both, it is better to be feared than loved - Niccolo Machiavelli
29. Oh how blessed young men who have struggled for a foundation and beginning in life. I shall never cease to be grateful for the three and half years of apprenticeship and the difficulties to be overcome, all along the way - JDR
30. Q: How are you Warren? Warren: Never been better
31. The truth is generally seen, rarely heard - Baltasar Gracian
32. I can accept failure, everyone fails at something. But I can't accept not trying. - Michael Jordan
33. Secret practice makes perfect
34. Sprezzatura - The capacity to make the difficult seem easy
35. Reveal it all and you become normal, boring, uninteresting
36. Play dumb, being clever attracts enemies
37. Don’t share your real thoughts keep silent
38. Pats on the head are for children
39. Time is an artificial concept that we ourselves created to make the limitlessness of eternity and the universe more bearable.
40. Necessity is what impels men to take action, and once the necessity is gone, only rot and decay are left - Machiavelli
41. Hey we’re out here, we’re serious, we’re focused, we’re competitive but we can do it in a fun way and smile and laugh and enjoy ourselves while we do it - Cam Newton
42. Success is not an accident - Stephen Curry
43. The fight is won or lost far away from witnesses—behind the lines, in the gym, and out there on the road, long before I dance under those lights - Muhammad Ali
44. The difference between successful people and very successful people is that very successful people almost always says no to everything - Warren Buffet
45. Taking big risks with money you worked hard to earn is literally gambling with years of your life that you can't get back.
46. Dress for the job you want, not the job you have
47. By all means marry; if you get a good wife, you’ll become happy; if you get a bad one, you’ll become a philosopher - Socrates
48. He who is not contented with what he has, would not be contented with what he would like to have - Socrates
49. I myself know nothing, all I do is inquire into things - Socrates
50. Even with a margin of safety in the investor’s favor, an individual security may work our badly. For the margin guarantees only that he has better chances for profit than loss - not that loss is impossible - Benjamin Graham
51. There are no good and bad stocks, there are only cheap and expensive stocks - implied by Benjamin Graham
52. To be an investor, you must be a believer in a better tomorrow
53. If mathematics is the Queen of Sciences, as the great mathematician Karl Friedrich Gauss christened in the 19th century, then physics is king. - Emanuel Derman
54. figure out the value of something and then— pay a lot less. - Joel Greenblat
55. We’re practically hardwired from birth to be lousy investors. - Behavioral Finance
56. The main point is to have the right general principles and the character to stick to them - Benjamin Graham
57. Imagine— there seems to be practically a foolproof way of getting good results out of common stock investment with a minimum of work . It seems too good to be true. But all I can tell you after 60 years of experience, it seems to stand up under any of the tests that I would make up. - Benjamin Graham
58. All great truths are simple in final analysis, and easily understood; if they are not, they are not great truths. - Napoleon Hill
59. Success means doing the best we can with what we have. Success is in the doing, not the getting—in the trying, not the triumph. - Wynn Davis
60. A Swedish proverb tells us that we get old too quick and smart too late.
61. People who aren’t rich criticize those who are, but would love to be rich themselves
62. Perfection equals paralysis - Dan Peña
63. Focus on the few, not the many - Dan Peña
64. The mirage of easy riches conceals a long history of ruined investors.
65. Knowing you still have a chance is a luxury
66. The question is not when he gonna stop, but who is gonna stop him? - Audioslave, Show me how to live
67. Readers are leaders
68. The people you are looking for are also looking for you
69. Now is all we have, we don't have the past or the future and therefore we cannot lose the past or the future for how can we lose what we do not have? This concludes that all we can possibly lose is now. - Marcus Aurelius
70. We're still a young culture [The Philippines], most of us are impatient with our development but we were free just 1946 so we still have a long way to go. - Marvin Flores
71. A life worth living is a life worth recording - Jim Rohn
72. And let us consider one another to provoke unto love and good works - Hebrews 10:24
73. There is no shortage of money on this planet, only a shortage of people thinking big enough
74. The reason why our type of investing works is that people are deterministic thinkers in a probabilistic world - James P. O'Shaughnessy
75. An actuary would never change his pricing for a fat 50-year old smoker just because the guy tells an emotional and convincing story about how he will turn his life around and get healthy - Pat O’Shaughnessy
76. During initial drawdowns, investors understandably want to know what managers are doing to “fix” the problem. The problem is usually that there is nothing to fix. Even the best system will fail very often. Just a little more than 50% of value stocks beat the market, on average. This is so frustrating, because, in almost every other pursuit, failure means something can be improved upon. In investing, you are guaranteed to have lots of failures, and most of those failures say very little about the quality of the system that produced them. What produces so many awful investor outcomes is mistaking a single failed investment for a failed system - POS
77. What is needed, I think, is a patience and a perseverance to seek without an end - POS
78. creativity is something that comes into being only when the mind is in a state of no effort - POS
79. I have found that conditioning is stripped away on a walk in the woods, or in the shower, or in the middle of the night. In certain moments like these, everything sometimes feels like a farce, a hoax, and with everything so exposed we can re-evaluate things on a blank slate - POS
80. To put a number to it, your goal should be to spend only 25% of what the average person of your income spends in each product category - MMM
81. Active management seems to make perfect sense until you review the record of traditional, actively managed funds. The majority does not beat the S&P 500. This is true over both short and long periods - JOS
82. Finding exploitable investment opportunities does not mean that it is easy to make money, however. To do so requires the ability to consistently, patiently, and slavishly stick with the strategy, even when it is performing poorly relative to other methods. - JOS
83. It is no surprise that academics find traditionally managed stock portfolios following a random walk. The past records of most traditional managers cannot be predictive of future returns because their behavior is inconsistent. You cannot make forecasts based on inconsistent behavior, because when you behave inconsistently, you are unpredictable - JOS
84. Intuitive-based management is almost always outperformed by the consistent application of time-tested strategies - JOS
85. What ails the truth is that it is mainly uncomfortable, and often dull. The human mind seeks something more amusing, and more caressing - HL Mencken
86. Like visual illusions, the mistakes of intuitive reasoning are not easily eliminated . . . merely learning about illusions does not eliminate them.
87. After the fact, we see a plethora of books, articles, and documentaries that chronicle the crash, with many authors claiming it was inevitable. That’s hindsight bias - JOS
88. Take solace in the Vodka - Ygritte
89. Remember that the base rates tell you nothing about how each individual member of that class will behave. Rather they indicate how all stocks with high dividend yields—or whatever factor is being reviewed—will behave - JOS
90. Base rates are boring; experience is vivid and fun. The only way anyone will pay 100 times a company’s earnings for a stock is if it has a tremendous story. Never mind that stocks with high PE ratios beat the market less than 1 percent of the time over all rolling 10-year periods between 1964 and 2009—the story is so compelling that you’re happy to throw the base rates out the window. - JOS
91. According to Barton Biggs’s book Wealth, War and Wisdom, there is ample evidence that so-called experts making intuitive forecasts are right less than half the time and that “they were worse than dart-throwing monkeys in forecasting outcomes when multiple probabilities were involved.” And the study he was referring to did not use a small sample—it covered 284 experts who made 82,361 forecasts over a period of many years. The book concluded that most of these errors were made because analysts made decisions using intuitive, emotional heuristics - JOS
92. One of the recurring themes of my research is that we just can’t forecast. There isn’t a shred of evidence to suggest that we can. This, of course, doesn’t stop everyone from trying - James Montier
93. Even though the rational thing to do is to bet with the base rate and accept that we will not always be right, we are forever rejecting the long-term evidence in the face of the short-term hunch, even though the probability of being correct plummets - JOS
94. An ounce of emotion is equal to a ton of facts - John Junor
95. Nowhere does history indulge in repetitions so often or so uniformly as in Wall Street. When you read contemporary accounts of booms or panics, the one thing that strikes you most forcibly is how little either stock speculation or stock speculators today differ from yesterday. The game does not change and neither does human nature. —Edwin Lefevre, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, 1923
96. We are fundamentally lazy, so having the persistence and the ability to do very detailed work is of tremendous advantage - POS
97. CFAs are like the jedi knights of finance - Stig Brodersen
98. You a have a 0.03% chance of finding the next Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL) (restated for simplicity) - POS
99. Don’t watch the clock; do what it does. Keep going. - Sam Levenson
100. Imagination without execution is hallucination - Henry Ford