by Seth Klarman
Goal of the book:
Avoiding where others go wrong is key to being successful more so than mimicking what others do right
The truth is, I am pained by the disastrous investment results experienced by great numbers of unsophisticated or undisciplined investors. If I can persuade just a few of them to avoid dangerous investment strategies and adopt sound ones that are designed to preserve and maintain their hard-earned capital, I will be satisfied
Rather this book is a blueprint that, if carefully followed, offers a good possibility of investment success with limited risk — Ideally this will be considered, not a book about investing, but a book about thinking about investing
Dollars are often using indexing strategies designed to avoid significant underperformance at the cost of assured mediocrity
Investors are sometimes their own worst enemies
The problem is that the exciting possibility of high near-term returns from playing the stocks-as-pieces-of-paper-that-you-trade game blinds investors to its foolishness
There is no such thing as a value bluff — you should not buy an overpriced security because you think someone else might pay even more for it
This course involves succumbing to the forces that guide most market participants, emotional responses dictated by greed and fear and a short-term orientation emanating from the relative-performance derby
Value investing: It is simply the process of determining the value underlying a security and then buying it at a considerable discount from that value.
The greatest challenge is maintaining the requisite patience and discipline to buy only when prices are attractive and to sell when they are not, avoiding the short-term performance frenzy that engulfs most market participants.
Value investors seek a margin of safety, allowing room for imprecision, bad luck, or analytical error in order to avoid sizable losses over time.
The most beneficial time to be a value investor is when the market is falling. This is when downside risk matters and when investors who worried only about what could go right suffer the consequences of undue optimism.
I find value investing to be a stimulating, intellectually challenging, ever changing, and financially rewarding discipline