A short quote from Warren Buffett in 2008 (similar to his 1998 comments):
If you are a professional and have confidence, then I would advocate lots of concentration. For everyone else, if it’s not your game, participate in total diversification. If it’s your game, diversification doesn’t make sense. It’s crazy to put money in your twentieth choice rather than your first choice. . . . [Berkshire vice-chairman] Charlie [Munger] and I operated mostly with five positions. If I were running $50, $100, $200 million, I would have 80 percent in five positions, with 25 percent for the largest.
芒格: When Warren lectures at business schools, he says, “I could improve your ultimate financial welfare by giving you a ticket with only 20 slots in it so that you had 20 punches—representing all the investments that you got to make in a lifetime. And once you’d punched through the card, you couldn’t make any more investments at all.”
He says, “Under those rules, you’d really think carefully about what you did and you’d be forced to load up on what you’d really thought about. So you’d do so much better.”
Again, this is a concept that seems perfectly obvious to me. And to Warren it seems perfectly obvious. But this is one of the very few business classes in the U.S. where anybody will be saying so. It just isn’t the conventional wisdom.
To me, it’s obvious that the winner has to bet very selectively. It’s been obvious to me since very early in life. I don’t know why it’s not obvious to very many other people.
“I don't look to jump over 7-foot bars: I look around for 1-foot bars that I can step over.”- 老巴
Warren Buffett 1998 Talk at University of Florida
“I don’t want to buy into any business that I’m not terribly sure of. So if I’m terribly sure of it, it probably isn’t going to offer incredible returns. Why should something that is essentially a cinch to do well offer you 40% a year or something like that? So we don’t have huge returns in mind. But we do have in mind never losing anything.”