KEEP IT SIMPLE

“I would not give a fig for the simplicity on this side of complexity, but I would give my life for the simplicity on the other side of complexity.” Oliver Wendell Holmes Jnr

“No problem can be solved until it is reduced to some simple form. The changing of a vague difficulty into a specific, concrete form is a very essential element in thinking.” JP Morgan

“Nothing is more simple than greatness; indeed, to be simple is to be great.” Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler.” Albert Einstein

“Nothing so impressive as simplicity.” Dickson G Watts

“The reason our ideas haven’t spread faster is they’re too simple.” Charlie Munger

“Take a simple idea and take it seriously.” Charlie Munger

“The most important thing in the investment business is to keep everything absolutely as simple as possible. We think complexity is the biggest barrier to high performance in the investment business.” Reece Duca

“There's a saying...‘Take a simple idea and take it seriously.’ And I think that's a really important thing to keep in mind. And I think when you look at lots and lots of extremely successful people right at the pinnacle of their careers, when you break it down, that quote is at the epicenter of how they got there. Usually it's not something earth-shattering. Usually it's something very simple, but they were intense about it, and they were just fanatical about it. And that's usually the fanaticism and intensity around a simple idea that gets you to the promised land.” Mohnish Pabrai

“We try to take a simple approach and this has worked very well over the years.” David Polen

“People under-rate the importance of a few simple big ideas.” Charlie Munger

“The simpler it is. The better I like it.” Peter Lynch

“The essence is simplicity.” Lou Simpson

"My motto has not changed: keep it simple." John Neff

“Learn to analyze well. Assess the risks and the prospective rewards, and keep it simple.” T. Boone Pickens

“Simplify. Get rid of irrelevant details so that the essential things and the relationships between them stand out. As the saying goes, “Any damn fool can make it complex. It takes a genius to make it simple.” Think of Picasso. He could paint beautiful representational paintings from an early age, but he continually pared down and simplified as his career progressed. Not everyone has a mind that works that way, but just because you can’t do something naturally doesn’t mean you can’t do it—you just have to have creativity and determination.” Ray Dalio

“I can't think of a single example in my whole life where keeping it simple has worked against us. We made mistakes, but they weren't because we kept it simple.” Charlie Munger

"My take has always been that you're likely to make the most money with the ideas that are the simplest.” Mohnish Pabrai

“[For the best investments] there is usually a simple thesis that comes through. It doesn’t mean a lot of work isn’t done, but the basic thesis is clear, straightforward and compelling rather than tweaking a number on page 40 of a spreadsheet.” Joel Greenblatt

“If you don’t quickly comprehend what a company is doing, then management probably doesn’t either.” Seth Klarman

“The first lesson is to keep it simple.” Jim Tisch

“Simple is usually better; in investing, there is no extra credit for degree of difficulty.” Todd Combs

“For me, simplicity has always been the key to successful investing, and the time-honored wisdom of Occam's razor, set forth by the fourteenth-century philosopher and friar William of Occam, has stood me in good stead.” John C Bogle

“I discovered at Harvard that simple is always better than complicated. When you see a lot of theory, you end up discovering that everything good is generally simpler than the more complicated things, and this also affected me for the rest of my life.” Jorge Paulo Lemann

“We prioritize the simple and easy, and quickly discard the complicated.” Allan Mecham

“I always tried to reduce everything to what is essential.” Jorge Paulo Lemann

“What Lynch and Buffett have demonstrated is that sometimes simple, even obvious ideas can be more than enough to beat the market.” Nick Train

“If you have to spend a large amount of time and it’s not obvious, it’s probably not a good investment. In some of our most successful investments, the amount of work that was done was in the hours as opposed to even in the days or weeks or months.” Bill Ackman

“At its heart, investing is simple, and to make it seem anything but, with the frequest repartition of short-lived facts and data points, may be a conceit. Indeed, it could be argued that a running commentary obfuscates a discussion of the things that really matter.” Nicholas Sleep

“I want a company that’s simple. They don’t have to make seven brilliant decisions every six months to keep going.” Peter Lynch

“You got to get the basic fundamentals crystal clear. Someone said that any damn fool can make it complicated, it takes a genius to make it simple.” Ray Dalio

“Some of the best analysts I have dealt with have enjoyed explaining complicated situations and how a company could turn itself around and so forth. I always tell them that they are smart, but the more complication they try to read into the story, the higher the probability that they will make a mistake. I tell them that there is nothing wrong with making money through simple investment ideas. After all, that's what Warren Buffett has done for years. As he has said, he doesn't jump over seven-foot bars; he looks for one-foot bars that he can easily step over!” Jean-Marie Eveillard

“We look for simple businesses that we can understand and where we believe the companies ten years from now will be selling the same basic products and services they are today.” Francois Rochon

“Our ideas are so simple that people keep asking us for mysteries when all we have are the most elementary ideas.” Charlie Munger

“I agree with Warren to keep it simple and not use higher mathematics in your analysis.” Walter Schloss

"Our investments continue to be few in number and simple in concept: The truly big investment idea can usually be explained in a short paragraph. We like a business with enduring competitive advantages that is run by able and owner-oriented people. When these attributes exist, and when we can make purchases at sensible prices, it is hard to go wrong (a challenge we periodically manage to overcome). Investors should remember that their scorecard is not computed using Olympic-diving methods: Degree-of-difficulty doesn't count." Warren Buffett 

“Keep it simple. Your thesis should be on the back of a postcard if it’s right.” Bruce Berkowitz

“Our failure here illustrates the importance of a guideline – stay with simple propositions – that we usually apply in investments as well as operations. If only one variable is key to a decision, and the variable has a 90% chance of going your way, the chance for a successful outcome is obviously 90%. But if ten independent variables need to break favorably for a successful result, and each has a 90% probability of success, the likelihood of having a winner is only 35%.” Warren Buffett

"Seek simplicity... It is logical that an investor can increase his chances of success if he can reduce the number of unknowns that he has to weigh. Thus, we are more confident when the outcomes of our investments are dependent on relatively fewer possibilities - few moving parts." Ed Wachenheim

“We like businesses that are simple to understand and simple to discuss.” Larry Robbins

“The business schools reward difficult complex behaviour more than simple behaviour, but simple behaviour is more effective. Warren Buffett

“I do believe in simplicity, and that one’s investment process should be simple. It should not be difficult to understand a company’s fundamentals and prospects to a sufficient degree of accuracy. It should not be difficult to see past short-term issues and focus on long-term potential.” Ed Wachenheim

"Ben Graham taught me 45 years ago that in investing it is not necessary to do extraordinary things to get extraordinary results." Warren Buffett

"The best way to keep downside risks under control is by sticking to simple ideas you understand well." Allan Mecham

"Jay [Pritzker] taught me to use simplicity as a strategy. He had an uncanny ability to grasp an extremely complex situation and immediately locate the weakness. He says that if there were twelve steps in a deal, the whole thing depended on just one of them. The others would work themselves out or were less important. He had a laser focus on risk." Sam Zell

"Some businesses are a lot easier to understand than others. And Charlie and I don’t like difficult problems. I mean, we — if something is hard to figure, you know, we’d rather multiply by three than by pi. I mean it’s just easier for us." Warren Buffett

"I prefer the laissez-faire approach to investing that waits for simple ideas, and eschew chasing down complex opportunities that exert pressure to take action. I’m reminded of a study which showed that as the number of variables requiring analysis increase, the odds of success decline, yet the confidence of participants soar due to extensive time and energy invested." Allan Mecham

“Stock picking is hard enough, why make it more difficult by pursuing companies or businesses that are overly complex?” Todd Wenning

“Where you have complexity, by nature you can have fraud and mistakes. You’ll have more of that than in a company that shovels sand from a river and sells it.” Charlie Munger

"This is not like Olympic diving. In Olympic diving, you know, they have a degree of difficulty factor. And if you can do some very difficult dive, the payoff is greater if you do it well than if you do some very simple dive. That’s not true in investments. You get paid just as well for the most simple dive, as long as you execute it all right. And there’s no reason to try those three-and-a-halfs when you get paid just as well for just diving off the side of the pool and going in cleanly." Warren Buffett

“You don’t have to hire out your thinking if you keep it simple.” Charlie Munger

“As an organisation, we are a big believer in the Chinese philosophy of Taoism. Taoism talks about ‘wu wei’ meaning that you really believe in the simplicity of business. So we do public, private, venture, China, other markets. But at the core of that we are just building quality businesses with quality people. Its about how we express ourselves. Just like tai chi. Its different forms of the same movement.” Lei Zhang

“Free brainwaves are perhaps the most undervalued asset in the investment business. If an individual is allocating significant amounts of time to an investment theme or idea with limited incremental clarity, something is usually wrong with the idea. Most of our best investment theses are simple and straightforward. Spending an inordinate amount of time on these less productive investment ideas ties up brainwaves that can otherwise be allocated to projects that have a much better return on time, and generally, invested capital as well.” Chase Coleman

"One of the greatest ways to avoid trouble is to keep it simple." Charlie Munger