Mohnish Pabrai Quotes

Investing in a poker game and investing in stocks, at least the way I do it, it's a very similar skillset.

If you can be sure of being right only 55 percent of the time, you can go down to Wall Street and make a million dollars a day. If you can't be sure of being right even 55 percent of the time, why should you tell other people they are wrong?

While enthusiasm may be necessary for great accomplishments elsewhere, on Wall Street it almost invariably leads to disaster

Wall Street is always too biased toward short-term profitability and biased against long-term growth.

All business proceeds on beliefs, or judgements of probabilities, and not on certainties.

A second reason why science cannot replace judgement is the behavior of financial markets.

You might say that economic history is the history of people learning to manage risk.

Investing is about making probabilistic decisions with limited information about an unknowable future. The variables are well known, as are the possible outcomes.

Markets love volatility.

I don’t know why the Stock Market does what it does.

I've learned that all investments have risk.

Markets are unforgiving, and sometimes they move for reasons we can't possibly foresee.

In some industries, we refer to risk taking as 'research and development.' At financial institutions, we often take risk by investing in securities.

Remember that banks aren't markets. The market is amoral. The market doesn't care who you are. You're a trade to the market. The market will sell you if they think you're riskier.

Just because a company's future is highly uncertain doesn't mean an investment in it is risky. In fact, some of the best potential investments are highly uncertain but have little risk of permanent capital loss.

Wall Street is littered with the bones of those who knew just what to do, but could not bring themselves to do it.

Market risk is like taking a plunge into a cool pool ... a lot of people are finding out right now what their risk tolerance is.

I put heavy weight on certainty. It's not risky to buy securities at a fraction of what they're worth.

When investing, pessimism is your friend, euphoria the enemy.

You're looking for a mispriced gamble. That's what investing is. And you have to know enough to know whether the gamble is mispriced. That's value investing.

I don't think you should invest in commodities. Eddie Murphy made it seem risky in Trading Places.

In Las Vegas, people know that the odds are stacked against them. On Wall Street, they manipulate the odds while you are playing the game.

Take the probability of loss times the amount of possible loss from the probability of gain times the amount of possible gain. That is what we're trying to do. It's imperfect, but that's what it's all about.

At heart, "uncertainty" and "investing" are synonyms.