Thought For The Day

We try to learn a lot about [the companies], we try to talk to their competitors, their managements.
Julian Robertson

 

I really don’t think it would be a good idea for me to hunt. I might shoot somebody or shoot myself in the foot. Julian Robertson

 

I feel very much like a batter who hasn’t had a hit at the last 15 to 20 times at bat… You worry about a slump even if you have confidence in yourself.
Julian Robertson

 

Are you sure your numbers are right? You’re sure this is in deficit? If so, then we should be bigger.
Julian Robertson

 

[In December 1998] We’re in a wild, runaway technology frenzy; meantime most other stocks are in the state of collapse. I have never seen such a dichotomy. There will be a correction.
Julian Robertson

 

Out of step with a world in which Palm, the market of the handheld Palm Pilot, is valued at more than GM and in which Pricelines.com, which sells airline tickets but has neither earnings nor planes, was valued at more than US airways.
Julian Robertson

 

We’ve had a movement away from value investing to momentum investing, where price is not a factor. I can’t tell you how many good investors really believe that price no longer matters, and that’s not my style…
Julian Robertson

 

Right now, everybody is chasing short-term performance. Even the leveraged-buyout people are buying telephone companies instead of industrial companies in part because they can spin off Internet-type subsidiaries.
Julian Robertson

 

Everybody – day traders, hedge fund operators, LBO people, right down the line – is piling into the same stocks, which is, in effect, an inadvertent Ponzi scheme. And it will eventually blow up.
Julian Robertson

 

[On being able to look at a long list of numbers in a financial statement he’d never seen before.] This one is wrong. [And he’d be right.]
Julian Robertson

 

[In December 2002] It is so much more fun and less stressful running your own money and not everyone else’s.
Julian Robertson

 

[On Peter Lynch when he retired at age 46] Peter missed one thing: He wasn’t having fun. He didn’t get people to help him.
Julian Robertson

 

I don’t want a lawyer who tells me what I can’t do. I hire a lawyer to tell me how I can do what I want to do!
Well, I don’t know as I want a lawyer to tell me what I cannot do. I hire him to tell me how to do what I want to do.
I don’t want a lawyer who tells me what I can’t do. I hire a lawyer to tell me how I can do what I want.
J P Morgan