Quotes About Company

Customers will never love a company until its employees love it first.

Those are the voices of my brothers, darling; I love the company of wolves.

My friends love coming over because they get fed.

Misery is a faithful company keeper, and Comfort was dissolving under its attention.

On the other hand, if these four-Mr. Graces, the brutish Frank, the mysterious Mr. Liu, and rude little Henry-were the only company John had had for a hundred and sixty-odd years, it explained a lot about his brooding.

But that is a method for cowards; the brave man goes out into the hall, comes back with a stick, and says firmly, You have just deliberately and cruelly exposed my ignorance before this company; I shall, therefore, beat you soundly with this stick in the presence of them all. This you then do to him or he to you, mutatis mutandis, ceteris paribus; and that is all I have to say on Ignorance.

Read backwards. When you research a company's financial reports, start reading on the last page and slowly work your way toward the front. Anything

Lynch insists that no one should ever invest in a company, no matter how great its products or how crowded its parking lot, without studying its financial statements and estimating its business value.

What have we learned? The market scoffs at Graham's principles in the short run, but they are always revalidated in the end. If you buy a stock purely because its price has been going up—instead of asking whether the underlying company's value is increasing—then sooner or later you will be extremely sorry. That's not a likelihood. It is a certainty.

To supply an element of concreteness here, let us suggest that to be "large" in present-day terms a company should have $50 million of assets or do $50 million of business.* Again to be "prominent" a company should rank among the first quarter or first third in size within its industry group.

If you buy a stock purely because its price has been going up—instead of asking whether the underlying company's value is increasing—then sooner or later you will be extremely sorry. That's not a likelihood. It is a certainty.

A price decline is of no real importance to the bona fide investor unless it is either very substantial- say, more than a third from cost- or unless it reflects a known deterioration of consequence in the company's position. p25

Among the things that should make your antennae twitch are technical terms like "capitalized," "deferred," and "restructuring"—and plain-English words signaling that the company has altered its accounting practices, like "began," "change," and

Unlike most people, many of the best professional investors first get interested in a company when its share price goes down, not up.

No intelligent investor, no matter how starved for yield, would ever buy a stock for its dividend income alone; the company and its businesses must be solid, and its stock price must be reasonable.

A great company is not a great investment if you pay too much for the stock.

Read backwards. When you research a company's financial reports, start reading on the last page and slowly work your way toward the front. Anything that the company doesn't want you to find is buried in the back—which is precisely why you should look there first.

A company can be a giant, or it can deserve a giant P/E ratio, but both together are incompossible.

Companies should buy back their shares when they are cheap—not when they are at or near record highs. Unfortunately, it recently has become all too common for companies to repurchase their stock when it is overpriced. There is no more cynical waste of a company's cash—since the real purpose of that maneuver is to enable top executives to reap multimillion-dollar paydays by selling their own stock options in the name of "enhancing shareholder value.

The more a stock has gone up, the more it seems likely to keep going up. But that instinctive belief is flatly contradicted by a fundamental law of financial physics: The bigger they get, the slower they grow. A $1-billion company can double its sales fairly easily; but where can a $50-billion company turn to find another $50 billion in business?

An industrial company's finances are not conservative unless the common stock (at book value) represents at least half of the total capitalization, including all bank debt.3 For a railroad or public utility the figure should be at least 30%.

Graham feels that five elements are decisive.1 He summarizes them as: the company's "general long-term prospects" the quality of its management its financial strength and capital structure its dividend record and its current dividend rate.

cash from financing activities" on the statement of cash flows in the annual report. They can make a sick company appear to be growing even if its underlying businesses are not generating enough cash—as Global Crossing and WorldCom showed not long ago.

element of concreteness here, let us suggest that to be "large" in present-day terms a company should have $50 million of assets or do $50 million of business.* Again to be "prominent" a company should rank among the first quarter or first third in size within its industry group.