Edward Snowden Quotes

I'm making a case against how money managers are handling customers' money. The objective of the customer is not being met if the fund managers are diversifying their assets into hundreds of businesses. If they do this, they are typically performing close to the indexes. But that's not the way wealth is created.

I have always been very diversified, so I have never suffered a catastrophic loss. I spread my money around the way a large institutional investor does. I use different brokerage firms. I manage some of my accounts myself.

Optimization tells us precisely how to diversify the portfolio, whether I should have 12% in semiconductors or 4% in biotech, etc., and it literally tells me how to diversify not only the industry groups but the stocks.

I started a business with two guys I played with, Ronnie Lott and Harris Barton: Champion Ventures, it's a fund of funds. We have $400 million or so under management.

I keep anywhere between 5-10 percent of my net worth in venture ideas.

If I were to leave and raise a venture fund, I would have to find 10 or 100 LPs. They would all give me a bunch of money, and I would take a percentage of that to pay myself. They would expect me to invest that over the next three years, and they want that money back in seven or eight years.

I invest in funds myself even though I run my own fund for my daughters.

Many follow a rule of thumb - no more than 5% in one stock. But that's not the entrepreneurial road to riches.

Forty percent of my portfolio is in the U.S. In the rest of the world, most of the places I invest in or invested in are Brazil, Russia, Germany with a little bit of Turkey, China, India, France and Israel sprinkled in there.

With a regular venture fund, you raise, let's say, a billion dollars, and then over the next three or four years, you've got to invest that money; otherwise, the people who invested with you will say, 'What are you doing? You're just collecting fees on our money.'

Global capital is agnostic - it has no loyalties. There's an overhang of capital in the U.S., and the key is yield pickup. What Africa is providing is a diversification play and also opportunities for yield pickup for the investor that's aware of what he or she is doing.

Well private money can take risks in a way that government money often isn't willing to.

Unlike a normal venture fund, we never stop raising capital. We can always absorb new capital on the platform and into the next deal as long as we feel it won't distort the allocation and the pricing.

Vanguard never would have happened if I hadn't been fired as CEO of Wellington Management Company, the firm that did the investing for the Wellington fund and eight sister funds.

Fund consultants like to require style boxes such as "long-short," "macro," "international equities." At Berkshire our only style box is "smart."

The biggest secret in venture capital is that the best investment in a successful fund equals or outperforms the entire rest of the fund combined.

The mutual fund industry has been built, in a sense, on witchcraft.

While I'm a venture capitalist who invests in early-stage tech companies, I often feel like a professional emailer and conference call maker. I try to spend most of my time doing whatever the companies we are investors in need me to do.

If your fund doesn't last for the long term, how can you invest for the long term?

A thoroughbred business man cannot enter heartily upon the business of life without first looking into his accounts.

Berkshire's past record has been almost ridiculous. If Berkshirehad used even half the leverage of, say, Rupert Murdoch, it would be five times its current size.

It's 1450 out of 1500 ETF funds that I just wouldn't touch because they're not diversified enough. Or they have some huge speculative twist to them that if you can guess the markets right you will do very well for a day or two but who can do that? Nobody.

The debate can be put in the form of the question: Resolved, that the best of money managers cannot be demonstrated to be able to deliver the goods of superior portfolio-selection performance. Any jury that reviews the evidence, and there is a great deal of relevant evidence, must at least come out with the Scottish verdict: Superior investment performance is unproved.

You should command and demand the tenfold leverage on your dollars when you give it away as well.

Most investors would be better off in an index fund.