Whitney Tilson Quotes

100 Whitney Tilson Quotes (T2 Partners Quotes)

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Your ability to learn from both successes and failures is a key determinant of how successful an investor you’ll be.
Whitney Tilson

You must have the patience and conviction to stick with what is, by definition, an unpopular bet.
Whitney Tilson

Those who stop learning get passed by.
Whitney Tilson

If you’re able to look beyond near-term trouble, you have an advantage over many professional investors.
Whitney Tilson

Sleeping well at night and compounding your money safely and at a decent clip over time seems like fun to us.
Whitney Tilson

Uncertainty is not necessarily bad – it creates bargain-hunting opportunities.
Whitney Tilson

The learning process for investors can often be complicated by human nature.
Whitney Tilson

Value investors are contrarians at heart, buying what’s out of favor and selling that which the market loves.
Whitney Tilson

To succeed as a contrarian you must recognize what the crowd believes, have concrete justification for why the majority is wrong, and have the patience and conviction to stick with what is, by definition, an unpopular bet.
Whitney Tilson

Going against conventional wisdom isn’t easy.
Whitney Tilson



Independent thinking is not just helpful in becoming a successful investor, it’s required.
Whitney Tilson

We seek safe, cheap companies with growth potential…
Whitney Tilson

The scourge of many investors is the temptation, regardless of the market environment to constantly tinker with their portfolios.
Whitney Tilson

Sell a stock only when the market’s optimism is clearly excessive.
Whitney Tilson

What’s both fascinating and challenging about investing is that the changing nature of business and finance means you can never have it all figured out.
Whitney Tilson

The best time to buy a company is when it’s hit a short-term rough patch and the stocks gotten clobbered.
Whitney Tilson

Investing too early is one of the more common sins of value investors.
Whitney Tilson

Although the pursuit of perfect investment timing is laudable, a more realistic goal is to respond smartly when timing isn’t so perfect.
Whitney Tilson

The Wall Street trading mentality and pressure on money managers to put up strong quarterly or even monthly performance numbers can make it hard for them to own obviously beaten-down stocks.
Whitney Tilson

‘Don’t you read the newspaper?’ But it’s precisely such negativity that creates bargains for investors with the patience and resilience to endure cheap stocks becoming even cheaper.
Whitney Tilson



Investing is a game of skill that depends on assessing the odds of uncertain future events.
Whitney Tilson

The first basic step in incorporating probabilities into investment decisions is to consider several potential outcomes explicitly.
Whitney Tilson

At the right price – and if management wisely milks the business and allocates capital – the stock of a declining business can be a great investment.
Whitney Tilson

[In November 2008] Skillfully assessing the probabilities of various outcomes for a company is insufficient to make a sound investment. Stock prices have future expectations already built in – the trick is to find the biggest gaps between those expectations and your own.
Whitney Tilson

‘The only source of knowledge is experience,’ said no less an authority than Albert Einstein. This is certainly true of investing…
Whitney Tilson

[On a ‘Self-attribution bias’.] We attribute good outcomes to our own prescience, wisdom and skill, whereas bad outcomes are caused by rotten luck.
Whitney Tilson

If investors don’t recognize the true reasons behind good or bad outcomes, they learn little.
Whitney Tilson

Even the world’s greatest companies encounter problems or otherwise fall out of favor. Correctly differentiating between those suffering temporary rather than permanent issues is the key to success here.
Whitney Tilson

Buying a good company in a distressed industry is often a great way to make money.
Whitney Tilson

Turning around a broken business is difficult and often takes much longer than expected – but when it occurs, a stock can rise many-fold.
Whitney Tilson



When growth companies stumble, growth and momentum investors often sell indiscriminately, which can be a great opportunity for value investors if – and it’s a big if – the high growth resumes or the stock falls so much that it’s a bargain even at lower growth levels.
Whitney Tilson

Activist investing – in which an outsider leans on a company to change its policies – has been a hot area. The key is whether the activist’s proposal for creating value makes sense and whether there’s support for change. If the situation is favorable, great money can be made by investing alongside the activist.
Whitney Tilson

It can pay to let others do the investing for you – if you can invest with them at a reasonable price.
Whitney Tilson

Five traps that can snare even conscientious investors: 1) The game has changed. 2) High and Rising Debt 3) Consumer Fads 4) Serial Acquirers or Mega-Acquisitions 5) Aggressive Accounting.
Whitney Tilson

[In October 2008] There’s a fine line between opportunity and trouble when a once-strong business goes into decline, as investors in newspapers have learned in recent years.
Whitney Tilson

Value investors are naturally drawn to companies in trouble – that’s what makes stock cheap if the difficulties prove to be temporary. But too much debt can ruin even the best-planned turnaround.
Whitney Tilson

When investors extrapolate far into the future what are highly likely to be impossible-to-maintain growth levels, trouble follows.
Whitney Tilson

Given the research showing that a significant majority of acquisitions are value destroyers for the buyers, it’s remarkable how frequently investors get excited about roll-up stories or big acquisitions.
Whitney Tilson

The gray areas in generally accepted accounting principles in the US leave managements considerable leeway in how aggressively or conservatively to represent company operations. When a company’s accounting treatment creates more questions than answers, something is usually wrong.
Whitney Tilson

Value investors pursue a wide variety of strategies: Some invest primarily in small companies, while others like large ones. Some go mostly overseas while others stick to the U.S. Some run concentrated portfolios, and others don’t. Some are activists; others aren’t.
Whitney Tilson



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