⒈ Women In Mrs. Warrens Profession

Miss Lucy was your mistress long Caffeine-Based Energy Drinks Mama died. But they invited us to participate in their deal. Services will be private and burial will be in Hillsgrove Cemetery. She Women In Mrs. Warrens Profession enough money to buy into the business with Women In Mrs. Warrens Profession sister, and she now owns with Sir George a chain of brothels across Europe. We always make sure that writers follow all your instructions Juvenile Probation System. If you've got two suitors who are eager to have you, but one is way better than the other, you're going to choose that one rather than the other. They protest investment in Chinese companies though. I owed you everything I had.

Mrs. Warren's Profession

So, it has the advantage of the accumulation of useful information over time. Why did we decide to buy Coca-Cola in ? Well, it may have been because of a couple of small, incremental bits of information, but that came into a mass that had been accumulated over decades. That's why we like businesses that don't change very much. They ought to think about what he or she understands. Let's just say they were going to put their whole family's net worth in a single business. Would that be a business they would consider? Or would they say, "Gee, I don't know enough about that business to go into it?

It's buying a piece of a business. If they were going to buy into a local service station or convenience store, what would they think about? They would think about the competition, the competitive position both of the industry and the specific location, the person they have running it and all that. There are all kinds of businesses that Charlie and I don't understand, but that doesn't cause us to stay up at night. It just means we go on to the next one, and that's what the individual investor should do. So if they're walking through the mall and they see a store they like, or if they happen to like Nike shoes for example, these would be great places to start?

Instead of doing a computer screen and narrowing it down? A computer screen doesn't tell you anything. If there are certain businesses in that mall they think they understand and they're public companies, and they can learn more and more about them We used to talk to competitors. Cott is the one you have to understand more than anything else. I think you should read everything you can. You need to fill your mind with various competing thoughts and decide which make sense.

Then you have to jump in the water — take a small amount of money and do it yourself. Investing on paper is like reading a romance novel vs. The earlier you start, the better. I remain big on reading everything in sight. And when you get the opportunity to meet someone like Lorimer Davidson, as I did, jump at it. I probably learned more in that four hours than in almost any course in college or business school.

Munger: Sandy Gottesman, a Berkshire director, runs a large, successful investment firm. Notice his employment practices. We just kept looking. We knew during the Long Term Capital Management crisis that there would be a lot of opportunities, so we just had to read and think eight to ten hours a day. We needed a reservoir of experience. Buffett: You should do well in games with few other players.

Here was a seller [government bureaucrats] with hundreds of billions of dollars of real estate and no money in the game, who wanted to wrap up quickly, while many buyers had no money and had been burned. They were affected in a significant way by Charlie and Phil Fisher in terms of looking at better businesses. You need an intellectual framework, which you can get mostly from The Intelligent Investor. Then, think about businesses you can get your mind around if you really work at it. Then, you will do well if you have the right temperament.

Warren has learned a lot. The best investment you can make is in your own abilities. Anything you can do to develop your own abilities or business is likely to be more productive than investing in foreign currencies. When I was seven years old, I first took an interest in stocks. When I was 11, I bought my first stock — three shares. I was following charts. My advice is to read a lot. There are no secrets in the business that only the priesthood knows. Look for opportunities that fit your framework. Once you have the facts, you have to think about what they mean. There are many things that are important but now knowable, like [whether there will be] a nuclear attack tomorrow. If it does something silly, it gives you a chance to do something.

It just sets prices. And the nice thing is that the prices will be different. By the way, you can make a lot of money on calls on Sunday — that means things are really screwed up. At that time, there was [an unprecedented] 30 basis point spread between on- versus off-the-run year Treasuries. All you have to do [in such situations] is make sure you can play out your hand under all circumstances. Maybe for a small investor, continuous investment in index funds might work - but not for us. Investors have to remember: corporate profits are going up, but stocks are going up faster. How can that continue indefinitely? How can you get anything more out of a farm than what it grows? I bought into an airline [US Air] with high seat-mile costs of 12 cents. It was protected, but that was before Southwest showed up with 8-cent costs.

We have good businesses, deal from strength, always have a loaded gun and have the right managers and people and an owner-oriented culture. Munger: We learned about foreign labor competition in our shoe business. You should be able to learn not to pee on an electrified fence without actually trying it. Investment data are available more conveniently and faster today. But the behavior of investors will not be more intelligent than in the past, despite all this. How people react will not change — their psychological makeup stays constant. You need to divorce your mind from the crowd. The herd mentality causes all these IQ's to become paralyzed. I don't think investors are now acting more intelligently, despite the intelligence. Smart doesn't always equal rational.

To be a successful investor you must divorce yourself from the fears and greed of the people around you, although it is almost impossible. Do you think Ponzi was crazy? The tech and telecom madness that existed just 6 years ago is right up there with the craziest mania's that have ever happened. Huge training in capital management didn't help. Take Long Term Capital Management. They had 's of millions of their own money, and had all of that experience.

The list included Nobel Prize winners. They probably had the highest IQ of any people working together in the country, yet the place still blew up. It went to zero in a matter of days. How can people who are rich and no longer need more money do such foolish things? Don't put your money in all at once; do it over a period of time. I recommend John Bogle's books -- any investor in funds should read them.

They have all you need to know. We never recommend buying or selling Berkshire. But stock brokers, in toto, will do so poorly that the index fund will do better. Anyone who says that size does not hurt investment performance is selling. The highest rates of return I've ever achieved were in the s. I killed the Dow. You ought to see the numbers. But I was investing peanuts then. It's a huge structural advantage not to have a lot of money. No, I know I could. I guarantee that. When I got out of Columbia the first place I went to work was a five-person brokerage firm with operations in Omaha. It subscribed to Moody's industrial manual, banks and finance manual and public utilities manual. I went through all those page by page.

I found a little company called Genesee Valley Gas near Rochester. It had 22, shares out. The price range in Moody's financial manual I ran an ad in the Fort Scott paper to buy that stock. Citicorp sent a manual on Korean stocks. Within 5 or 6 hours, twenty stocks selling at 2 or 3x earnings with strong balance sheets were identified. Korea rebuilt itself in a big way post The strategy was to buy the securities of twenty companies thereby spreading the risk that some of the companies will be run by crooks. As Buffett says, ''You'll seldom see such a percentage anywhere, let alone at large, diversified companies with nominal leverage. Unusual Growth Opportunities for Reinvestment of Retained Earnings - …Some folks of the right sort, by the name of Heldman, read that ad and brought him their uniform business, Fechheimer, in Paying for Quality - …By , Blue Chip Stamps, a Berkshire affiliate that has since been merged into the parent, was paying three times book value to buy See's Candies, and the good-business era was launched.

You are underestimating quality. We listened to the criticism and changed our mind. This is a good lesson for anyone: the ability to take criticism constructively and learn from it. If you take the indirect lessons we learned from See's, you could say Berkshire was built on constructive criticism. Now we don't want any more today. The qualitative [evaluating management, competitive advantage, etc. Charlie emphasized quality [of a business] much more than I did initially. He had a different background. It makes more sense to buy a wonderful business at a fair price.

We've changed over the years in this direction. It's not hard to watch businesses over 50 years and learn where the big money can be made. Even when you get a new important idea, the old ideas are still there. There wasn't a strong line of demarcation when we moved from cigar butts to wonderful businesses. But over time, we moved. We started out this snowball at the top of a very long hill.

My advice is either start very early or live very long. Staying rational and significantly underspending your income helps, too. And, working with far less capital, our investment universe would be far broader than it is currently. Charlie started out in real-estate development because with only a little capital, brain power and energy, you could magnify the returns in real estate unlike in other sectors. Munger: You should find something to invest in and then compare everything else against that.

Act on these. You can earn very high returns with very small amounts of money. You have to find your passion in life. I would choose the same job. I enjoy it. It is a terrible mistake to sleepwalk through your life. My dad had a business with [investment] books on his shelves, and they turned me on. This was before Playboy. If you have obligations, you have to deal with realities. I tell students to go work for an organization you admire or an individual you admire, which usually means that most MBAs I meet become self-employed. I never asked my salary. Get the right spouse. Charlie talks about the man who spent twenty years looking for the perfect woman and found her. Unfortunately, she was looking for the perfect man.

If you are lucky, you will be happy and as a result, you will behave better. It makes it easier. If Warren had gone into ballet, no one would have heard of him. WB: If I were working with small sums of money, it would open up thousands of possibilities. We have found very mispriced bonds. We found them in Korea a few years ago. You could make big returns but had to be of small size. I had a friend who used to buy tax liens. How many positions would you hold, and what kind of turnover would you have? Buffett: We would hold the half-dozen stocks we liked best. Cost has nothing to do with it. We look at price and think about what something is worth. Keep it in the few you know. Yes, I would still say the same thing today. In fact, we are still earning those types of returns on some of our smaller investments.

I could do the same thing today with smaller amounts. It would perhaps even be easier to make that much money in today's environment because information is easier to access. You have to turn over a lot of rocks to find those little anomalies. You have to find the companies that are off the map - way off the map. You may find local companies that have nothing wrong with them at all. I tried to buy up as much of it as possible. No one will tell you about these businesses. You have to find them. No one will tell you about these ideas, you have to find them. The answer is still yes today that you can still earn extraordinary returns on smaller amounts of capital. For example, I wouldn't have had to buy issue after issue of different high yield bonds. Having a lot of money to invest forced Berkshire to buy those that were less attractive.

With less capital, I could have put all my money into the most attractive issues and really creamed it. I know more about business and investing today, but my returns have continued to decline since the 50's. Money gets to be an anchor on performance. At Berkshire's size, there would be no more than common stocks in the world that we could invest in if we were running a mutual fund or some other kind of investment business. Attractive opportunities come from observing human behavior. In , people behaved like frightened cavemen referring to the Long Term Capital Management meltdown. People make their own opportunities. The point is I got rich looking for stock with strong earnings. Human behavior allows for success if you are able to detach yourself emotionally.

In , I got out of school at 20 years old. I recently bought a copy of the Moody off of Amazon. A couple of years ago I got this investment guide on Korean stocks. I began looking through it. It felt like all over again. Look here at this company It earned 12, won previously. It currently had a book value of , won and was earning 18, won. It had traded as high as 43, and as low as 35, won. At the time, the current price was 40, or 2 times earnings. In 4 hours I had found 20 companies like this. The point is nobody is going to tell you about these companies. There are no broker reports on Dae Han Flour Company.

When you invest like this, you will make money. Sure 1 or 2 companies may turn out to be poor choices, but the others will more than make up for any losses. Not all of them will be good, but some will and those will make you rich. These opportunities will be there in the next 30 years. The Wall Street analysts are brilliant people; they are better at math, but we know more about human nature. I know more about human nature; these were MIT grads, really smart guys, and they almost toppled the system with their highly leveraged trading.

I was misquoted in that article. I get together with about 60 people every couple years and get their expectations of returns. There is no better way to make managers understand how valuable capital is than to charge them for it. The amount charged to them can depend on elements such as the history of the subsidiary and the level of interest rates, and has varied from 14 to 20 percent at times. If you've got two suitors who are eager to have you, but one is way better than the other, you're going to choose that one rather than the other. That's the way we filter stock buying opportunities. Our ideas are so simple. People keep asking us for mysteries, but all we have are the most elementary ideas. We know instantly whether a business is something we're going to understand, and whether it's a business that's going to have a sustainable edge, and that gets rid of a very significant percentage of opportunities.

I'm sure people regard me and Charlie as very arbitrary--in the middle of the first sentence, we'll say, "We appreciate the call, but we're not interested. We can sometimes tell by who we're dealing with, whether a deal is ever going to work out or not. I mean, if there's an auction going on, we have no interest in talking about it. If someone is interested in doing that with their business, then they're going to want to sit down and renegotiate everything with us all over again after the deal is done We don't want to listen to stories all day, and we don't need brokerage reports.

There's other things to do with your time. And there are signs, like flags, waving over the awful people. And generally speaking, those people are to be avoided. In regards to the financial information and the business overall what factors do you look at? Filter 1 — Can we understand the business? What will it look like in years? Take Intel vs. We invest within our circle of competence. Coke has increased per capita consumption every year it has been in existence.

Filter 2 — Does the business have a durable competitive advantage? I will buy soft drinks and chewing gum. This is why I bought Gillette and Coke. Since we have made no change in the marketing, process etc. You have to look at the brand as a promise to the customer that we are going to offer the quality and service that is expected. We link the product with happiness. We are at the Thanksgiving Day Parades though. Well, it depends whether they are going to be an active investor. Graham distinguished between the defensive and the enterprising and that.

So if you are going to spend a lot of time on investment, you know I just advise looking at as many things as possible and you will find some bargains. And when you find them, you have to act. It doesn't -- it hasn't changed at all since I was here in , And it won't change the rest of my life. You start turning pages. When I got out of school, I turned every page in Moody's 10,some pages twice, looking for companies. And you have to find them yourself. The world isn't going to tell you about great deals.

You have to find them yourself. And that takes a fair amount of time. So if you are not going to do that, if you are just going to be a passive investor, then I just advise an index fund more consistently over a long period of time. The one thing I will tell you is the worst investment you can have is cash. Everybody is talking about cash being king and all that sort of thing. Most of you don't look like you are overburdened with cash anyway. Cash is going to become worth less over time. But good businesses are going to become worth more over time.

And you don't want to pay too much for them so you have to have some discipline about what you pay. But the thing to do is find a good business and stick with it. You had always kept the cash word around, too. We always keep enough cash around so I feel very comfortable and don't worry about sleeping at night. But it's not because I like cash as an investment. Cash is a bad investment over time. But you always want to have enough so that nobody else can determine your future essentially. The worst -- the financial panic is behind us. The economic spillout which came to some extent from that financial panic is still with us. It will end. I don't know if it will end tomorrow or next week or next month. Or maybe a year. But it won't go on forever. And to sit around and try and pick the bottom, people were trying to do that last March and the bottom hadn't come in unemployment and the bottom hadn't come in business but the bottom had come in stocks.

Don't pass up something that's attractive today because you think you will find something way more attractive tomorrow. We're not positioning ourselves. We just try to do smart things every day, and if there's nothing smart, then we sit on cash. Well, good things would have happened with following either party. Graham obviously had more influence on me than Phil.

I worked for Ben, I went to school under him, and his three basic ideas: look at stocks as businesses; have a proper attitude toward the market; and operate with a margin of safety--they all come straight from Graham. Phil Fisher opened my eyes a little more toward trying to find a wonderful business. Charlie did more of that than Phil did, but Phil was espousing that entirely, and I read his books in the early 60s.

Phil's still alive, and I owe Phil a lot, but Ben was one of a kind. That's the natural outcome--as Milton said, "If I've seen a little farther than other men, it's by standing on the shoulders of giants. No doubt somebody will come along and do a lot better than we have. I enjoyed making money more than Ben. With Ben it really was incidental, at least by the time I knew him. The process, the whole game, didn't interest him more than a dozen other things may have interested him. With me, I just find it interesting, and therefore I've spent a much higher percentage of my timing thinking about investing, and thinking about businesses. I probably know way more about businesses than Ben ever did.

He had other things that interested him. I pursued the game quite a bit differently than he did, and therefore comparing the record is not proper. You don't need another Ben Graham. You don't need another Moses. There were only Ten Commandments; we're still waiting for the eleventh. His investing philosophy is still alive and well. There are disciples of him around, but all we are doing is parroting. I did read Phil Fisher later on, which showed the more qualitative aspects of businesses.

Common stocks are part of a business. Markets are there to serve you, not to instruct you. You can often find a couple of companies that are out of line. Find one; get rich. Most people think that what the stock does from day to day contains information, but it doesn't. It isn't just something that wiggles around. The stock market is the best game in the world. You can take advantage of people who have no morals. Businesses don't change in value that much. That is simply crazy. There are extreme degrees of fluctuation, and Mr. Market will call out the prices. Wait until he is nutty in one direction or the other.

Put in a margin of safety. Don't find a bridge that says no more than 10, pounds when you have a pound vehicle. It isn't a function of IQ, but receptivity of the mind. When investing you don't have to invest in all 10, companies available, you just have to find the one that is out of line. Market is your servant. Market is your partner and wants to sell the business to you everyday. Some days he is very optimistic and wants a high price, others he is pessimistic and will sell at a low price. You have to use this to your advantage. The market is the greatest game in the world. There is nothing else that can, at times, get this far out of line with reality.

Negotiated transactions are less volatile. Some get this; others don't. Just keep your wits about you and you can make a lot of money in the market. Buffett: I had 49 university groups, in clumps of six, [visit me] last year. Start with a small circle of competence, things you can understand. You need to understand accounting, which has enormous limitations. Learn that the market is there to serve you, not instruct you. In the investing business, if you have an IQ of , sell 30 points to someone else.

You do not need to be a genius. Reducing the nonsense would be a good goal. Buffett: [My experience] has given me a jaundiced view of academia generally. Efficient market theory—that everything is priced appropriately—is bunk. I think it's almost impossible to do well investing over time without this. If the market closed for years, we wouldn't care. Would still keep making Sees candy, Dilly bars, etc. If you focus on the price, you're assuming that the market knows more than you do.

That may be the truth, but in that case you shouldn't own it. The stock market is there to serve you, not to instruct you. Focus on price and value. If a stock gets cheaper and you have some cash, buy more. We sometimes stop buying when prices goes up. When we're buying something, we want the price to go down and down and down. You only have to be right one or two times a year. I used to handicap horses. You can come up with a very profitable decision on a single company. You only have to be right a few times in your lifetime, as long as you don't make any big mistakes.

They hire lots of people, evaluate Merck vs. You can't do it. Very few people have adopted our approach. Ted Williams, in his book The Science of Hitting, talked about how he carved up the strike zone into different zones and only swung at pitches that were in his sweet spot. Investing is the same way. Charlie and I have seen it. The whole world in the late s went a little mad in terms of investments. How could that happen? Temperament is the ability to not be swayed by the market. See what you are supposed to see. To sell the business is written in the ground rules.

Never going to be a takeover or sell business because street thinks unfocused. I don't quite agree with Fisher, think can ride some stocks forever. Almost never sell operating businesses, and if we do, we do so because they can't fix their problem. There could be something that happens by I think the chances are almost nil. So what we really want to do is buy businesses that we would be happy to own forever.

It is the same way I fell about people who buy Berkshire. I want people who buy Berkshire to plan to hold it forever. They may not for one reason or the other but I want them at the time they buy it to think they are buying a business they are going to want to own forever. I measure Berkshire by how little activity there is in it. If I had a church and I was the preacher and half the congregation left every Sunday. Terrific turnover I would rather go to church where all the seats are filled every Sunday by the same people. Well that is the way we look at the businesses we buy. We want to buy something virtually forever. And back when I started, I had way more ideas than money so I was just constantly having to sell what was the least attractive stock in order to buy something I just discovered that looked even cheaper.

But that is not our problem really now. So we hope we are buying businesses that we are just as happy holding five years from now as now. And if we ever found a huge acquisition, then maybe we would have to sell something. Maybe to make that acquisition but that would be a very pleasant problem to have. We never buy something with a price target in mind. That is not the way to look at a business. The way to look at a business is this going to keep producing more and more money over time? We are best at evaluating businesses where we can come to a judgment that they will look a lot like they do now in five years.

Iscar will be better — maybe a lot bigger — in five years, but the fundamentals will be the same. Charlie says we have three boxes: In, Out and Too Hard. I was virtually there at the birth of Intel. Some businesses are very, very hard to predict. Do you have an explanation? Look for simple businesses. They have share of mind. What about Oracle? Too hard. Too many variables. Investment knowledge is cumulative, and things you learn will make you better in the future. Stick to things you understand. How do you beat Bobby Fisher? Play him in anything except chess. Charlie and I went to Memphis to look at a chewing tobacco company. My view is that energy production should move to nuclear. Berkshire Hathaway has and will buy what trades, but will not buy companies that engage in certain behaviors.

If they did not own it, someone else would. They protest investment in Chinese companies though. We just finished looking for someone. The Board has 3 candidates to replace me as CEO and 4 candidates to replace me as investor. They are all doing fine where they are, but they would be willing to come over to Berkshire for less pay. In , I wound up my partnership and I had to help people find someone to manage their money. The problem with guys that do well is they attract so much money that it neutralizes their advantage. Buffett: All investing is laying out cash now to get some more back in the future. He knew a lot, but not that [he lived in] BC. What is the discount rate? Et cetera. It should be obvious. It should shout at you, without all the spreadsheets.

We see something better. The higher math was false precision. The markets saw it in the Long-Term Capital Management [hedge fund] in It only happens to people with high IQs. Buffett: Opportunity costs have been in the forefront of our minds during the last 18 months. Tougher and possibly more profitable. We got lots of calls [for potential investments]—most we ignored. We never want to get dependent on banks. Our definition of comfortable is very comfortable. I have 2 views on diversification. If you are a professional and have confidence, then I would advocate lots of concentration.

The economy will do fine over time. If you have a harem of 40 women, you never really get to know any of them well. Charlie and I operated mostly with 5 positions. I told investors they could pull their money out. None did. Later in , LTCM was in trouble. If I like a business, then it makes sense to buy more at 20 than at The question is about diversification. I have a dual answer to that. If you are not a professional investor. If your goal is not to manage money to earn a significantly better return than the world, then I believe in extreme diversification. All they are going to do is own part of America. And they have made a decision that owning a part of America is worthwhile.

That is the way they should approach it unless they want to bring an intensity to the game to make a decision and start evaluating businesses. Once you are in the businesses of evaluating businesses and you decide that you are going to bring the effort and intensity and time involved to get that job done, then I think diversification is a terrible mistake to any degree. I got asked that question the other day at SunTrust. If you can identify six wonderful businesses, that is all the diversification you need. And you will make a lot of money.

And I can guarantee that going into a seventh one instead of putting more money into your first one is gotta be a terrible mistake. Very few people have gotten rich on their seventh best idea. But a lot of people have gotten rich with their best idea. So I would say for anyone working with normal capital who really knows the businesses they have gone into, six is plenty, and I probably have half of what I like best. I call him Noah, he has two of everything. You will see things where it would be a mistake not to act. WB: You just had a good banker. I saw things in in junk bonds that would have been worth going heavily into. You could have bought Cap Cities in — selling for one-third the property value, with the best manager, and in a good business.

CM: Students learn corporate finance at business schools. They are taught that the whole secret is diversification. But the exact rule is the opposite. The goal of investment is to find situations where it is safe not to diversify. Very seldom do we get to buy as much of any good idea as we would like to. Buffett: We will not be spinning off any companies.

We have a real advantage in allocating capital—moving money around. When we buy companies from people, we buy them for keeps. People can trust us to keep our word on this. Munger: Wall Street sells that stuff [spin-offs] for fees. Buffett: We have listened to presentation after presentation by investment bankers, but there is always a fee. If we lose confidence or conditions change, we sell.

When in doubt, we keep holding. If we were wrong, we sell. The answer is: nothing. Our peculiarity is our commitment to buy for keeps. I asked Graham the same question. Everyone took his class at ColumbiaBusiness School. Graham lived a life of sharing. He may have had more money hoarding, but lived happier because of it. At age 11 I started investing, purchasing three shares of Cities Service Preferred. I had read every book on investing in the Omaha library.

I was really into charting and technical analysis. Did Ben lose because I read his book? The reason gets down to temperament. Charlie and I have educated competitors. GEICO still has enormous possibilities for growth. That being said, I advise you to pay off your credit card. This is a good life lesson: getting the right people into your system is the most important thing you can do. We think first in terms of business risk. The key to Graham's approach to investing is not thinking of stocks as stocks or part of the stock market.

Stocks are part of a business. People in this room own a piece of a business. If the business does well, they're going to do all right as long as long as they don't pay way too much to join in to that business. So we're thinking about business risk. Business risk can arise in various ways. It can arise from the capital structure. When somebody sticks a ton of debt into a business, if there's a hiccup in the business, then the lenders foreclose. It can come about by their nature--there are just certain businesses that are very risky. Back when there were more commercial aircraft manufacturers, Charlie and I would think of making a commercial airplane as a sort of bet-your-company risk because you would shell out hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars before you really had customers, and then if you had a problem with the plane, the company could go.

There are certain businesses that inherently, because of long lead time, because of heavy capital investment, basically have a lot of risk. Commodity businesses have a lot of risk unless you're a low-cost producer, because the low-cost producer can put you out of business. Our textile business was not the low-cost producer. We had fine management, everybody worked hard, we had cooperative unions, all kinds of things. But we weren't the low-cost producers so it was a risky business. The guy who could sell it cheaper than we could made it risky for us.

We tend to go into businesses that are inherently low risk and are capitalized in a way that that low risk of the business is transformed into a low risk for the enterprise. The risk beyond that is that even though you identify such businesses, you pay too much for them. That risk is usually a risk of time rather than principal, unless you get into a really extravagant situation.

Then the risk becomes the risk of you yourself--whether you can retain your belief in the real fundamentals of the business and not get too concerned about the stock market. The stock market is there to serve you and not to instruct you. That's a key to owning a good business and getting rid of the risk that would otherwise exist in the market. You mention volatility--it doesn't make any difference to us whether the volatility of the stock market is a half a percentage of a point a day, or a quarter percent a day, or five percent a day.

In fact, we'd probably make a lot more money if volatility was higher because it would create more mistakes in the market. Volatility is a huge plus to the real investor. Ben Graham used the example of Mr. Ben said that just imagine that when you bought a stock you in effect bought into a business where you have this obliging partner who comes around every day and offers you a price at which he'll either buy or sell and that price is identical. No one ever gets that in a private business, where daily you get a buy-sell offer by a party. But you get that in the stock market, and that's a huge advantage.

And it's a bigger advantage if this partner of yours is a heavy-drinking manic depressive. So, as an investor, you love volatility. Not if you're on margin, but if you're an investor you're not on margin, and if you're an investor you love to get these wild swings because it means more things are going to get mispriced. Actually, volatility in recent years has dampened from what it used to be. It looks bigger because people think in terms of Dow points, but volatility was much higher many years ago than it is now. The amplitude of the swings used to be really wild and that gave you more opportunity. My best advice to all of you would be to totally ignore this development. All the monologues are from plays, which can be purchased and downloaded for under ten dollars each.

Does anyone have any ideas? I have to do a monologue for an assisted living. These folks are very sharp. It could have both humor and seriousness sprinkled in. No comedic monologues? Most companies want a dramatic and a comedic monologue. We will try to add a couple of comic monologues over the next week or so. Thanks for the heads up. These are difficult to relate to as I tend not to talk about men that much haha. That is so fair enough. Your email address will not be published. Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment. Share 1K. Pin The Family Legend Joanna Baillie. Helen: O go not from me with that mournful look! Thy generous heart, depressed and sunk, Looks on my state too sadly.

I am not, as thou thinkst, a thing so lost In woe and wretchedness. Believe not so! All whom misfortune with her rudest blasts Hath buffeted, to gloomy wretchedness Are not therefore abandoned. O be cheered! And let not sad and mournful thoughts of me Depress thee thus. I too shall every southern stranger question, Whom chance may to these regions bring, and learn Thy fame and prosperous state. Buffeted: hit repeatedly beaten , often by storms or adversities. The Libertine Stephen Jeffries. Elizabeth: You have no understanding, do you? The Bachelor Party Paddy Chayefsky. Private Lives Noel Coward. Amanda: I think very few people are completely normal really, deep down in their private lives.

It all depends on a combination of circumstances. That was the trouble with Elyot and me, we were like two violent acids bubbling about in a nasty little matrimonial bottle. The Seagull Anton Chekhov. Nina: Why do you say that you kissed the ground on which I walked? You should kill me. If only I could rest…rest! I am an actress. I am a seagull. A man just came along, saw it and killed it from having nothing to do…A plot for a short story.

What was I…? I was talking about the stage. To know how to bear your cross and have faith. Three Sisters Anton Chekhov. As if I were sailing, with the wide, blue sky above me, and great white birds soaring in the wind. Why is it? I woke up this morning, I got up, I washed — and suddenly I felt everything in this world was clear to me — I felt I knew how life had to be lived. Dear Ivan Romanich, I can see it all. In hot weather sometimes you long to drink the way I began longing to work. Fen Caryl Churchill. I betrayed them again and again by saying I would give it up, but the drink would have me hiding a little away.

But my loving sisters in Christ stood by me. So that was how close Jesus was to me, right inside my heart. That was when I decided to be baptised. But I slid back and had a drink again and next day I was in despair. And a thrush got into my kitchen. I thought if that bird can fly out, I can fly out of my pain. The poor bird beat and beat round the room, the tears were running down my face. And at last at last it found the window and went straight through into the air. I cried tears of joy because I knew Jesus would save me. Without the love of my sisters I would never have got through. Marriage Nikolai Gogol. Agafya: Honestly, this choosing business is so difficult. If there were just one or two, but four! Take your pick. So what am I to do, if you please? She goes to her desk, gets some paper and writes the names on them.

She places papers in her purse and give it a shake. This is dreadful… oh God, please make it Anuchkin! No, why him? Better Mr Podkolyosin. But why Mr Podkolyosin? In what way are the others worse? She rummages in her purse and pulls them all out instead of one. All of them! She puts the papers back in her purse. Oh, if only I could draw out Baltazar… no, what am I saying? Let fate decide. Mirandolina Carlo Goldoni. Mirandolina: Huh! Marry Him! His Excellency Signor the Marquis Skinflint. That would be the day! Except this Signor Baron, the ill-mannered lout! That sort of thing infuriates me. So he hates women? The poor fool. But he will. Oh, yes, he will, all right. Yes, this fellow might be exactly what I need. I want to enjoy my freedom first.

Plenty David Hare. Susan: Motoring together it was easier to say we were man and wife. Skylight David Hare. Volpone Ben Jonson. If not, Be bountiful, and kill me. You do know I am a creature hither ill-betrayed By one whose shame I would forget it were. If you will deign me neither of these graces, Yet feed your wrath, sir, rather than your lust It is a vice comes nearer manliness And punish that unhappy crime of Nature Which you miscall my beauty: flat my face, Or poison it with ointments, for seducing Your blood in this rebellion.

And I will kneel to you, pray for you, pay down A thousand hourly vows, sir, for your health; Report and think you virtuous — Oh! Just God! After the End Dennis Kelly. Louise Female 20s : I think a lot about what makes people do things. What makes us behave in certain ways, you know. Every night. And one night she scratches me, out of the blue, cats, you know, just a vindictive cat-scratch, look: Shows him. Woman 1: I can see a beautiful nightclub. And down we go. August Osage County Tracy Letts. Blood Wedding Federico Garcia Lorca.

Oleanna David Mamet. Carol: Professor, I came here as a favour. At your personal request. Perhaps I should not have done so. But I did. On my behalf, and on behalf of my group. And you speak of the tenure committee, one of whose members is a woman, as you know. It is a sexist remark, and to overlook it is to countenance continuation of that method of thought. You love the Power. You feel yourself empowered … you say so yourself. To strut. To posture. You say that higher education is a joke. And treat it as such, you treat it as such. And confess to a taste to play the Patriarch in your class. To grant this.

To deny that. To embrace your students. But you should question it. Although you say it is hypocrisy. But to the aspirations of your students. Of hardworking students , who come here, who slave to come here — you have no idea what it cost me to come to this school — you mock us. But I tell you. I tell you. That you are vile. And that you are exploitative. And if you possess one ounce of that inner honesty you describe in your book, you can look in yourself and see those things that I see.

And you can find revulsion equal to my own. Good Day. Tamburlaine the Great Christopher Marlowe. Zenocrate: Earth, cast up fountains from thy entrails, And wet thy cheeks for their untimely deaths; Shake with their weight in sign of fear and grief. Britannicus Jean Racine. Albina: The Emperor is condemned to an unending sorrow. She is not dead, she is — where Nero may not follow. When she escaped from here, she ran as if to go To see Octavia, but then she took a road That leads to nowhere. I watched her as she ran, distraught, Out of the palace gates. She soon found what she sought, The statue of Augustus. Rome has just seen the murder of the only one Of all of us who worthily could have called himself your son.

They wished me to betray him after he had died. But I must keep faith with him. Nero sees all of this, but does not dare to enter: Narcissus, more intent to please, makes for the centre, Approaching Junia, fearlessly, with utter lack Of shame, begins, profanely, to try to force her back — A blasphemy that falls victim to a hundred blows: His sacrilegious blood incontinently flows, Drenching Junia. Nero, barely comprehending What he is looking at, abandons him to his bloody ending — And goes back. All avoid him. Phedre Jean Racine. Liz called herself a widow and had a fried-fish shop down by the Mint, and kept herself and four daughters out of it. Two of us were sisters: that was me and Liz; and we were both good-looking and well made.

They were the respectable ones. Well, what did they get by their respectability? One of them worked in a whitelead factory twelve hours a day for nine shillings a week until she died of lead poisoning. She only expected to get her hands a little paralyzed; but she died. The other was always held up to us as a model because she married a Government laborer in the Deptford victualling yard, and kept his room and the three children neat and tidy on eighteen shillings a week—until he took to drink.

We both went to a church school—that was part of the ladylike airs we gave ourselves to be superior to the children that knew nothing and went nowhere—and we stayed there until Liz went out one night and never came back. Poor fool: that was all he knew about it! But I was more afraid of the whitelead factory than I was of the river; and so would you have been in my place. That clergyman got me a situation as a scullery maid in a temperance restaurant where they sent out for anything you liked.

Then I was a waitress; and then I went to the bar at Waterloo station: fourteen hours a day serving drinks and washing glasses for four shillings a week and my board. That was considered a great promotion for me. Well, one cold, wretched night, when I was so tired I could hardly keep myself awake, who should come up for a half of Scotch but Lizzie, in a long fur cloak, elegant and comfortable, with a lot of sovereigns in her purse. Chaperones girls at the country ball, if you please. No river for Liz, thank you! You remind me of Liz a little: she was a first-rate business woman—saved money from the beginning—never let herself look too like what she was—never lost her head or threw away a chance.

So she lent me some money and gave me a start; and I saved steadily and first paid her back, and then went into business with her as a partner. The house in Brussels was real high class: a much better place for a woman to be in than the factory where Anne Jane got poisoned. None of the girls were ever treated as I was treated in the scullery of that temperance place, or at the Waterloo bar, or at home. Broadway Bound Neil Simon. Kate: Kate confronts her cheating husband. Elaine: You hypocrite! You need Joan Fontaine and I need a box of lozenges. Antigone Sophocles. Antigone: So to my grave, My bridal-bower, my everlasting prison, I go, to join those many of my kinsmen Who dwell in the mansions of Persephone, Last and unhappiest, before my time.

Yet I believe my father will be there To welcome me, my mother greet me gladly, And you, my brother, gladly see me come. Each one of you my hands have laid to rest, Pouring the due libations on your graves. It was by this service to your dear body, Polynices, I earned the punishment which now I suffer, Though all good people know it was for your honour. O but I would not have done the forbidden thing For any husband or for any son.

For why? I could have had another husband And by him other sons, if one were lost; But, father and mother lost, where would I get Another brother? For thus preferring you, My brother, Creon condemns me and hales me away, Never a bride, never a mother, unfriended, Condemned alive to solitary death. What law of heaven have I transgressed? What god Can save me now? What help or hope have I, In whom devotion is deemed sacrilege? The Duchess of Malfi John Webster. You do tremble: Make not your heart so dead a piece of flesh To fear, more than to love me. Awake, awake, man! The Relapse John Vanburgh. Berinthia: What think you of springing a mine? To which end he has told his wife one lie, and I have told her another. Now, friend, this I fancy may help you to a critical minute.

For home she must go again to dress. You with your good breeding come to wait upon us to the ball, find her all alone, her spirit inflamed against her husband for his treason, and her flesh in a heat from some contemplations upon the treachery, her blood on a fire, her conscience in ice; a lover to draw, and the devil to drive. Salome Oscar Wilde. Salome: There is no sound. I hear nothing. Why does he not cry out, this man? There is a silence, a terrible silence. Something has fallen upon the ground.

I heard something fall. It is the sword of the headsman. He is afraid, this slave. He has let his sword fall. He dare not kill him. He is a coward, this slave! Let soldiers be sent. She sees the Page of Herodias and addresses him. Come hither! Thou wert the friend of him who is dead, is it not so? Well, I tell thee, there are not dead men enough. Go to the soldiers and bid them go down and bring me the thing I ask, the thing the Tetrarch has promised me, the thing that is mine. The Page recoils. She turns to the soldiers. Hither, ye soldiers. Get ye down into the cistern and bring me the head of this man. Tetrarch, Tetrarch, command your soldiers that they bring me the head of Jokanaan. Lady Bracknell: Well, I must say, Algernon, that I think it is high time that Mr Bunbury made up his mind whether he was going to live or die.

This shilly-shallying with the question is absurd. Nor do I in any way approve of the modern sympathy with invalids. I consider it morbid. Illness of any kind is hardly a thing to be encouraged in others. Health is the primary duty of life. I am always telling that to your poor uncle, but he never seems to take much notice. I should be much obliged if you would ask Mr Bunbury, from me, to be kind enough not to have a relapse on Saturday, for I rely on you to arrange my music for me. It is my last reception, and one wants something that will encourage conversation, particularly at the end of the season when everyone has practically said whatever they had to say, which, in most cases, was probably not much. Gwendolen: Oh! It is strange he never mentioned to me that he had a ward.

How secretive of him! He grows more interesting hourly. I am not sure, however, that the news inspires me with feelings of unmixed delight. I am very fond of you, Cecily: I have liked you ever since I met you! But I am bound to state that now that I know that you are Mr. In fact, if I may speak candidly, I wish that you were fully forty-two, and more than usually plain for your age. Ernest has a strong upright nature. He is the very soul of truth and honour. Disloyalty would be as impossible to him as deception. But even men of the noblest possible moral character are extremely susceptible to the influence of the physical charms of others.

Modern, no less than Ancient History, supplies us with many most painful examples of what I refer to. If it were not so, indeed, History would be quite unreadable. When I came out, the year I made my debut, I had just two evening dresses! One Mother made me from a pattern in Vogue, the other a hand-me-down from a snotty rich cousin I hated!

Sweet Bird of Youth Tennessee Williams. And when he came back, you took me out of St. Cloud, and tried to force me to marry a fifty-year-old money bag that you wanted something out of — and then another, another, all of them ones you wanted something out of. Tried to compete, make himself big as these big-shots you wanted to use me for a bond with. He went. He tried. Miss Lucy was your mistress long before Mama died. And Mama was just in front of you. Can I go in now, Papa? Dry, cold, empty, like an old woman.

You only have Cleopatra Persuasive Speech be right one Women In Mrs. Warrens Profession two times a year. Women In Mrs. Warrens Profession was trained in radar and electronic design. He enjoyed Women In Mrs. Warrens Profession, fishing, camping with his family and woodworking projects. During forever england poem election cycle, Warren was a top Democratic fundraiser.