There's just nothing to me so invaluable in my business, but in many businesses, as great mentors.
— Stanley Druckenmiller
In my experience, the more successful an idea is, the easier it is to fund it. In philanthropy, it's almost harder.
The first thing I heard when I got in the business - not from my mentor - was, 'Bulls make money, bears make money, and pigs get slaughtered.' I'm here to tell you I was a pig. And I strongly believe the only way to make long-term returns in our business that are superior is by being a pig.
The way you create deflation is you create an asset bubble.
If you're extremely confident, taking a loss doesn't bother you.
You can be far more aggressive when you're making good profits.
I have given myself a Tesla for my 60th birthday.
I like putting all my eggs in one basket and then watching the basket very carefully.
Bitcoin is like anything else: it's worth what people are willing to pay for it.
Good debt growth is when you borrow money, and it goes into the real economy. You do capital spending. You build businesses.
I believe that good investors are successful not because of their IQ, but because they have an investing discipline. But, what is more disciplined than a machine? A well-researched machine can make many average investors redundant, leaving behind only the really good human investors with exceptional intuition and skill.
Whenever I see a stock market explode, six to 12 months later you are in a full blown recovery.
If you're running a business for the long term, the last thing you should be doing is borrowing money to buy back stock.
If you're early on in your career and they give you a choice between a great mentor or higher pay, take the mentor every time. It's not even close. And don't even think about leaving that mentor until your learning curve peaks.
I don't think Donald Trump is Ronald Reagan.
Earnings don't move the overall market; it's the Federal Reserve Board... focus on the central banks, and focus on the movement of liquidity... most people in the market are looking for earnings and conventional measures. It's liquidity that moves markets.
I think Bezos is incredible.
Soros has taught me that when you have tremendous conviction on a trade, you have to go for the jugular. It takes courage to be a pig. It takes courage to ride a profit with huge leverage.
I don't really like hedging. To me, if something needs to be hedged, you shouldn't have a position in it.
Carried interest... you're making money on somebody else's capital. It's not on your own. If that's not income, I don't know what is.
Once an economy reaches a certain level of acceleration... the Fed is no longer with you... The Fed, instead of trying to get the economy moving, reverts to acting like the central bankers they are and starts worrying about inflation and things getting too hot.
I love being around kids. I couldn't figure out why all these 70-year-olds wanted to hang out with me when I was 27. Now I understand, and I'm trying to steal their energy from them like they stole from me at the time.
All in all, I don't think robots and greater automation can bring about a utopian world as I imagined it would as a kid 50 years ago.
I think ageing demographics is a bigger issue in China than people think. And the problems it creates should be become evident as early as 2016.
I've always loved to play games, and face it: investing is one big game. You need to be decisive, open-minded, flexible and competitive.
With my business, the way you make big money is you find a great management team and a good concept, and you stick to it, and you add to it over time. In philanthropy, there was more this idea that once an idea was formulated, you moved along.
Soros is the best loss taker I've ever seen. He doesn't care whether he wins or loses on a trade. If a trade doesn't work, he's confident enough about his ability to win on other trades that he can easily walk away from the position.
Every serious deflation I've looked at is preceded by an asset bubble, and then it bursts.
I love Amazon.
The few times that Soros has ever criticized me was when I was really right on a market and didn't maximize the opportunity.
I don't put Tesla in the Amazon category. They have not proved to me that, as a financial model and an economic model, it is going to work.
What a company's been earning doesn't mean anything. What you have to look at is what people think it's going to earn. If you can see something in two years is going to be entirely different than the conventional wisdom, that's how you make money.
I don't like the repeal of the estate tax.
I think old people like Hillary Clinton and I shouldn't try and be cool with social networks, you know; maybe she should leave that stuff up to Chelsea.
If machines do everything well, including allocating capital and resources efficiently, can that be deflationary, can that eliminate poverty? I don't know. It's hard to be very optimistic if you look at how humans have behaved historically.
Part of my advantage is that my strength is economic forecasting, but that only works in free markets, when markets are smarter than people. That's how I started. I watched the stock market, how equities reacted to change in levels of economic activity, and I could understand how price signals worked and how to forecast them.
For 30 years I've been responsible for managing client money, and it's been a joy, but at some point I need to move on. Thirty years is enough.
