Christopher Browne Quotes 

105 Christopher Browne Quotes

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Intrinsic value is important because it lets the investor take advantage of temporary mispricing of stocks.
Christopher Browne

If the stock price of a mundane company declines, which it often does, you have the comfort of knowing that it is still worth more than you paid for it, and someday the price is likely to recover. If a stock is grossly overvalued and its stock price crashes, history shows that it is unlikely it will regain its former inflated value.
Christopher Browne

Most investors are driven by emotions that run the gamut from extreme pessimism to jubilant optimism. These emotions can drive stock prices to the extremes of overvaluation and undervaluation. The job for the smart investor is to recognize when this is happening and to take advantage of the emotional swings of the market.
Christopher Browne

This is what rational value investors do. They sit back and wait for the market to offer stocks for less than they are worth and to buy the same stocks back for more than they are worth.
Christopher Browne

Investing in stocks is not like putting your money in a savings account that pays 10 percent annually. Returns will fluctuate from year to year, sometimes dramatically. The 10 percent return is only an average of some bang-up years, and some gut-wrenching years.
Christopher Browne

A margin of safety gives you an edge over just blindly buying stocks or an index fund.
Christopher Browne

A company with a lot of debt where earnings barely cover the interest expense is a far riskier investment than a company with some extra cash on its balance sheet.
Christopher Browne

The best time to buy stocks is when they are cheap.
Christopher Browne

When stock markets are cheap in general, we are in periods of economic uncertainty.
Christopher Browne

Things change and trends do not go on forever.
Christopher Browne



By being global in your approach to loading up your value investing store, you can find many more stocks below book value than if you confine yourself to just the United States (or any other single part of the world.).
Christopher Browne

Buying stocks that sell cheaply when compared with their asset value works.
Christopher Browne

To ignore global opportunities means not investing in many of the world’s largest and finest corporations.
Christopher Browne

There are a lot of reasons insiders may sell shares in their company. They may wish to diversify their holdings, plan their estate, buy a dream house, or pay off a soon-to-be ex-spouse. They may sell shares obtained by exercising stock options. For these reasons, sales by insiders are not as strong an indicator as their buys. There is only one logical reason for insiders to reach into their wallets and buy stock in the open market. They think the stock price is going higher.
Christopher Browne

I pay close attention to insider buying because these people have intimate knowledge of the business and the prospects for improvement in current conditions.
Christopher Browne

When the board of directors of a company decides to buy back its stock in the open market, it may well be sign that they believe the shares are undervalued and do not adequately reflect the future prospects for growth. They feel that the best return on corporate cash is buying up their own shares in the marketplace.
Christopher Browne

Insiders are usually investors, not traders.
Christopher Browne

Sometimes the only thing standing in the way of a cheap stock and a profit for an investor is a catalyst that can make the market take notice.
Christopher Browne

As prices fall, at exactly the time investors should be sharpening their pencils to select stocks to buy at lower prices, they join the panic and run down the hall for the unreasonable security of a cash position.
Christopher Browne

Today’s worst stocks become tomorrow’s best stocks, and the darlings of the day turn into tomorrow’s spinsters.
Christopher Browne



Investors who did their homework and invested in banks during this time earned enormous returns… You just had to catch the babies being thrown out with the bathwater.
Christopher Browne

Finding cheap stocks is a little bit like a treasure hunt.
Christopher Browne

Once you know which markers are most likely to lead to an investment opportunity, your hunt for value becomes much easier.
Christopher Browne

Analysts seem to be more focused on short-term earnings gains than future long-term success.
Christopher Browne

Being patriotic is one thing. Paying twice as much for a product that you can get from someplace else at a much lower price goes against human nature.
Christopher Browne

Banks are perhaps the oldest industry after the oldest profession, and no one has yet invented something better. As financial assets grow, so should banks.
Christopher Browne

My best friend in the whole world when it comes to building my inventory of value investing opportunities is the no-thank-you pile. If there is something you do not understand or are not comfortable with, in the no-thank-you pile it should go.
Christopher Browne

Winning in the investment game means not losing.
Christopher Browne

A strong balance sheet is a good indicator of a company’s stamina, its ability to survive when the going gets tough.
Christopher Browne

If a company can grow its profit margins over time, every new dollar of goods sold has a leveraged impact on sales.
Christopher Browne



A lot of reputedly smart professional analysts could not figure out Enron’s income statement, but that did not stop them from becoming big fans of the stock…
Christopher Browne

A company with a product that is in demand can easily raise prices to generate more profit.
Christopher Browne

If demand for a product is waning in a particular industry, no amount of good business practices will allow for price increases.
Christopher Browne

Post [Hurricane] Katrina, insurance companies raised prices as many people and businesses scrambled to buy extra disaster insurance.
Christopher Browne

The less competition in an industry, the easier it is to increase prices.
Christopher Browne

The simplest way to raise the bottom line is to sell more products or services. Assuming that costs remain about the same, every increase in the number of units sold improves the bottom line.
Christopher Browne

All too often, companies let expenses get out of control and it becomes necessary to make cutbacks to restore profitability. Every dollar saved, whether in the price of paper clips or health care costs, flows to the bottom line and helps to restore profitability.
Christopher Browne

If sales can be grown at no additional cost, every dollar goes right to bottom line profits. If, however, a company has to hire additional salespeople, build new plants, or add additional shipping costs to gain growth, the increased sales will not all translate into bottom line profit.
Christopher Browne

As no man is an island, neither does any company operate in a vacuum. It has competition that is out to take away sales and profits.
Christopher Browne

An occasional sale by an insider may mean nothing; consistent sales by many officers and directors are a clear indication that management thinks the marketplace has put too high a value on the company, and they are getting out while the getting is good.
Christopher Browne



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