The fact is, when I feel I have to write a letter and make noise, that almost always means I've made a mistake and the more productive use of my time is to sell and move on. As a buy-and-hold investor, the perfect outcome is when a company earns high returns on their equity capital [...]

A fair price today is one that should allow us over time to realize on our investment the same level of compound annual growth we expect in per-share book value, earnings or cash flow whichever is most appropriate for the company at hand. What that tries desperately to preclude is paying so much that the [...]

We only want to invest in management teams with equal measures of talent and integrity, because one without the other is worthless. The talent part largely speaks for itself through an objective look at performance, especially over time. Integrity is a bit harder to judge, but it's one of those things that you know when [...]

Character today is best judged in the proxy statement what do they pay themselves and how? Is their financial self-interest truly aligned with mine as a shareholder? I have absolutely no problem with the people running huge, complicated, global businesses making a lot of money. The big problem we have now is that you're seeing [...]

It's hard to get away from truisms and clichés, but things that appear too good to be true investments or otherwise usually are.

I do tend to stay away from companies overly dependent on raising capital and the good opinion of the securities markets. Mark Twain used to say he was a good writer because he could “remember everything, whether it happened or not.” I'm leery of situations where management has too much temptation to report great earnings,whether [...]

I have a ready answer when people ask me why I’m such a long-term investor, which is because I failed miserably as a short-term investor. I’m not against making money in the short term, I just don’t know how to do it.

My feeling is that it’s beyond my skill set to try to buy local companies outside the U.S. Some people will make a lot of money doing that, but not me. What I am doing is buying companies like GE and Citigroup and Diageo, who already have tremendous expertise and operations outside the U.S. to [...]

I like to invest in consumer brands in areas like chocolate, whiskey, beer and wine. These are products that have been around for thousands of years, that people like, and I don’t think that’s going to change. Changes in technology or the trend toward outsourcing don’t diminish the fact that people like to have a [...]

I have often made the mistake of investing in businesses that needed and used more capital to operate than I thought they would. That’s one reason I tend to avoid heavy industrial companies. Some very smart people own General Motors now I hope they make money and it’s probably good for the country if GM [...]