AGE

“The value of experience is not in seeing much, but in seeing wisely.” William Osler

“No man’s knowledge can go beyond his experience.” John Locke

“In this field, at least, you can improve when you’re old. You get an enormous advantage from practice in this field." Charlie Munger

[At age 103 to a 40 year old] “I think people my age are brighter than people your age. You don’t make the same mistakes and that by itself gives you an enormous edge.” Irving Kahn [the legendary late Irving Kahn died in early 2015, at the time the oldest living investor at 109.]

“No matter how smart you are, or how smart you think you are, there really is no substitute for experience in the investment business.” Henry Kravis

“It's hard to believe that he's getting better with each passing year. It won't go on forever, but Warren is actually improving. It's remarkable: Most seventy-two-year-old men are not improving, but Warren is." Charlie Munger

“There is no secret method for any of this stuff. You just have to be aware of concepts, smart in their application, and it helps to be an old man so that you have the experience that helps, or an old woman…” Howard Marks

“I'm eager to report that great investing has nothing to do with youth - and that the middle-aged investor who lived through several kinds of markets may have an advantage over the youngster who hasn't." Peter Lynch

“There are secrets to our world than only practice can reveal, and no opinion or analysis will capture in full.” Nassim Nicholas Taleb

“I believe I’m a much better investor today than I was twenty years ago, and I really have my colleagues to thank for that more than anything else.” Lee Ainslee

“There are certain benefits of age in the investment business." Josh Friedman

“In my business, I keep saying to myself I'm get better with age. The outcomes would support that." Chuck Akre

“You do get better over time because you take more arrows in your back, and with each arrow in your back you learn to run better.” Mohnish Pabrai

“I don’t know anyone who [learned to be a great investor] with great rapidity. Warren has gotten to be one hell of a lot better investor over the period I’ve known him, as have I. So the game is to keep learning. You gotta like the learning process.” Charlie Munger

“When you’re twenty-eight you think you know everything. When you’re thirty-one you think you know everything. Now I’m fifty-two you now realize you didn’t really know that much. The hubris of youth.” James Dinan

“The wisdom to be gleaned from older men is a sure way to steepen the DIY (do it yourself) learning curve." Frank Martin

“The only game where age may actually be an advantage." Barton Biggs

“Investing is kind of a game of connecting the dots. The nice thing about it is the longer you are in the business, as long as you are intellectually curious, your collection of data points of dots gets bigger and bigger. That is where someone like Warren is just incredible. He has had a passion for investing for well over 70 years. He started by the age of 10 or 12. He keeps building that library of data, the ability to recognize patterns in data." Ted Weschler

“Charlie Munger talks about this quite a bit; accumulated wisdom, and having been in the business and studied companies, and studied business, and studied people, and studied history for years and years and years and years and years, you ought to be better at it the longer you've been doing it and the older you get." Thomas Gayner

"You evolve to more and more levels of difficulty. It's like learning how to ski, I guess. You ski at one level, and then all of a sudden - I've skied for 50 years, 15 hours a day or 14 hours a day. I got better at skiing, and so what's the kick? The kick is then to ski where you keep yourself still at the edge, and to do that, that's the kick, the evolution." Ray Dalio

“This is an accretive business. The longer you do it, the more you learn, the better you get at it. Because you see more things. We see more cycles, we see more industries, we learn more business models. We learn how more business models fail. And all of us in business tend to get better as we get older." Ken Shubin Stein

“We have been through challenging cycles in the past and we always figure it out. That's the beauty of being in this business for more than 25 years. You come to understand the movements in the markets." Marc Lasry

“An enormous advantage of the investment world is that knowledge builds up, and throughout the years we have studied in great depth many companies that we monitor closely." Álvaro Guzmán

“Things we learned 40 years ago, though, will help [us] recognize the next big idea.” Warren Buffett

"You probably need to study for several years and see at least one full business and market cycle before you can be competent to invest." Terry Smith

“Warren’s investing skills have markedly increased since he turned 65. Having watched the whole process with Warren, I can report that if he had stopped with what he knew at earlier points, the record would be a pale shadow of what it is.” Charlie Munger

“I have a saying: There are no brave old people in finance. Because if you’re brave, you mostly get destroyed in your 30s and 40s. If you make it to your 50s and 60s and you’re still prospering, you have a very good sense of how to avoid problems and when to be conservative or aggressive with your investments.” Steve Schwarzman

“One bonus about this profession is you get better over time. Most professions, as you get older, you get out of the game. Take the example of competitive sports. If you are a figure skater or gymnast, after your teenage years you are out of the game. With investing, if you are doing it the right way, you get better over time. Your knowledge accumulates exponentially. When I look back at everything I have done, I would have done it all slightly differently, but that is because I am better at it today. So if you approach it in a fundamentally sound way, as you mature, you become better and better. That process and progression is like compounding money. In fact, you can compound knowledge faster than money. If you truly love this game, I would suggest that you don’t take short cuts. It might take longer but it is more rewarding." Li Lu

“One of the good things about investing is that there is no mandatory retirement age; you only get wiser as you get older. My father has gone through the best and worst of times in the stock market, and he has taught me to remain calm in both crisis and frenzies.” Thomas Kahn

"The one advantage of allocating capital is that an awful lot of what you do is cumulative in nature, so that you do get continuing benefits out of things that you’d done earlier. So by now, I’m probably fairly familiar with most of the businesses that might qualify for investment at Berkshire." Warren Buffett

“My whole life has been a progression of incremental insights into determining risks.. nothing refines your understanding and assessment of risk better than experience." Sam Zell

“[Buffett's] skill improved and improved as he got older and older during 50 years, instead of deteriorating like the skill of a basketball player does." Charlie Munger

“I could wax for a half-hour on the utter folly of people being forced to retire at the age of 65. I think I have produced better results in the last five years than in any other five-year period. The refinement that comes from contemplating your own mistakes and improving yourself has continued." Phil Fisher

“Now I have 25 years - a quarter century - of investing in the public markets, and so I don’t think I’m better, I just have more history in my database to look at what’s going on.” Philippe Laffont

“As you grow older you tend to appreciate what you don’t know a lot more, and that is part of this trend and that action makes you not only a better investor, but a better human being. I think it’s important. I feel I know a lot less today than I thought I knew 30 years ago. And that’s the important part of not just investing the life.” Rajiv Jain

“Four years ago, Walter Schloss walked into my office with a piece of paper on which he had typed out his then 40-year investment record of approximately 20% annually compounded. To my knowledge, this is an individual record without peer. I broke the record into decades and sent it around to the members of one of the investment boards on which I sit. I wrote that if we had found Walter ten years ago, we would not have hired him despite a 30- year record of compounding at 20% per year. He was nearly 70, he had no real succession plan, no staff, and no computers. His research library consisted of borrowing my copy of Value Line. And we would have missed another ten years of compounding at 20% per year.” Chris Browne