Common Sense

“Common sense diligently applied is usually the best possible solvent of difficult business problems.” Frederick Taylor Gates

“The wisdom of the wise is an uncommon degree of common sense.” Dean R Inge

“Common sense is the secret of making money. Common sense I believe is the most valuable possession any one can have." Hetty Green

“Common sense is the least common commodity.” Li Lu

“Successful investing is only common sense. Each system for investing will eventually become obsolete.” Sir John Templeton

“In my opinion, good investing largely is common sense, made somewhat difficult by the behavioural imperfections of man.” Ed Wachenheim

“It’s not all that complicated.  Common sense and patience make a successful investor.” Ralph Wanger

“Good investing is really just common sense.” Jim Rogers

“A lot of what you do in investing is just simple common sense.” Chris Browne

““Most of all, you need common sense.” Roy Neuberger

"Common sense is left behind when people are bedazzled by a concept." Ralph Wanger

“Logic, reason, and common sense are your best tools for synthesizing reality and understanding what to do about it.” Ray Dalio

“Organized common (or uncommon) sense — very basic knowledge — is an enormously powerful tool. There are huge dangers with computers. People calculate too much and think too little.” Charlie Munger

“Just plain common sense is important.  At times we find people who are brilliant but lack common sense.” Seth Klarman

"Part of [having uncommon sense] is being able to tune out folly, as opposed to recognising wisdom.  If you bat away many things, you don't clutter yourself." Charlie Munger

“I think at the end of the day, it's about spotting those opportunities. It's applying common sense. Sometimes common sense is hard to come by.” Lei Zhang

“We will continue to follow a common sense based approach to investing, holding intellectual honesty and rigorous analysis as the keystones to success.” Allan Mecham

“Much of investing is about reasonability, common sense and judgement.” Ed Wachenheim

"In investing one has to sense when the road curves in order to be successful. Such sensing is where anyone with a modicum of common sense can have an advantage over the professional security analysts of Wall Street who time and time again miss the curve in the road as they look in the rearview mirror." Bennett Goodspeed

"[The investor's role] is not that of a prophet but of a businessman seizing clearly evident investment opportunities. He is not trying to be smarter than his fellow investors but simply trying to be less irrational than the mass of speculators who insist on buying after the market advances and selling after it goes down. If the market persists in behaving foolishly, all he seems to need is ordinary common sense in order to exploit its foolishness." Benjamin Graham

"Are there are dangers in getting too caught up in the minutiae of using a computer so that you miss the organised common sense? There are huge dangers. There'll always be huge dangers. People calculate too much and think too little." Charlie Munger

“Organized common (or uncommon) sense — very basic knowledge — is an enormously powerful tool. There are huge dangers with computers. People calculate too much and think too little.” Charlie Munger

"Part of that [having uncommon sense], I think, is being able to tune out folly, as distinguished from recognizing wisdom. You've got whole categories of things you just bat away so your brain isn't cluttered with them. That way, you're better able to pick up a few sensible things to do." Charlie Munger

“If you are honest, hardworking, reasonably intelligent and have good common sense, you can do well in the investment field as long as you are not too greedy and don’t get too emotional when things go against you.” Walter Schloss

“We never know anything here except the most elementary common sense. It's amazing that it's sufficed for us.” Charlie Munger

“I believe the greatest risk control is common sense, but people fall into the habit of sleeping well at night because the computer says they should. They ignore common sense, a mistake I see repeated over and over in the investment world.” Mark Sellers

"Good risk management is common sense, vigorously applied." Munib Islam

 “When people use the word "common sense," what they mean is uncommon sense. Because the standard human condition is ignorance and stupidity. And when they say, old Joe has common sense, what they mean is he has uncommon sense.” Charlie Munger

“It takes courage, it takes open-mindedness. I would say don’t get too narrow, I don’t believe it’s the most precise quantitative and modelling skills that will govern your success. It is common sense, logic, the ability to actually think for yourself and actually survive mentally when you think either you’re out of your mind – all by yourself - or the whole world is crazy and you’re saying how can that possibly be." Paul Singer

"I think that takes a certain amount of what an old Omaha friend used to call “uncommon sense.” He used to say, “There is no common sense. When people say common sense, they mean uncommon sense.” Part of it, I think, is being able to tune out folly as distinguished from recognizing wisdom. And if you just got whole categories of things you just bat away, so your brain isn’t cluttered with them, then you’re better able to pick up a few sensible things to do." Charlie Munger