Reuters
- Billionaire investor Warren Buffett and Berkshire Hathaway boss thinks a proper attitude to investing is more important than technical skills.
- “The proper attitude to investing is much more important than any technical skills,” Buffett told Yahoo Finance.
- The famed investor has been notably silent as stock markets have suffered massive volatility and oil prices have collapsed, sparking curiosity on what the investor has been up to himself in the world of investing.Â
- Visit Business Insider’s homepage for more stories.
If you are a young investor starting off at the early stages of using money Warren Buffett has some advice for you. A proper attitude to investing is more necessary than technical skills, he said, debunking myths that investing is just technical.Â
Speaking to Yahoo Finance in an interview posted Tuesday, the billionaire investor, chairman and chief executive of Berkshire Hathaway, said: “The proper attitude to investing is much more important than any technical skills.”
Buffett said it is also important for investors to understand accounting, which he said he mostly learnt himself when he began investing back in his younger years.
“You have to know what you are reading, unless you know that language, and some people have more aptitude than others for it. That is one thing I learnt by myself,” Buffett said.Â
Buffett also restated his well-known penchant for buying stocks for the long term, saying wannabe investors should ideally only buy a stock if they’d be happy not to be able to sell it for five years.
“You need to buy something that you are not going to get a quote on, say they are going close the stock exchange for five years, so you should still be happy owning it [whatever the investor has bought] as a business.
“If you owned Coca Cola in 1920, it didn’t matter whether it was public, it mattered what I was doing with customers.”
He added: “You probably would have been better off if there wasn’t any market then. You would have not been tempted to sell them [Coca Cola stocks], as you would watch the business grow and you would be happy.”
The famed investor has been notably silent as stock markets have suffered massive volatility and oil prices have collapsed, sparking curiosity on what he has been up to himself in the world of investing.
The Berkshire Hathaway boss may have ditched airlines and plowed more than $20 billion into stock buybacks, but probably hasn’t bought many other stocks or struck any big bailout deals, according to a fund manager and Berkshire shareholder of more than two decades.
Additional reporting by Theron Mohamed
