Li Lu Quotes

“You don't have to swing a lot [as an investor]. You study all the time, but you don't have to do anything.”

“Intelligent investors are the ones who are always intellectually honest.”

“The core of value investing is to understand value. What you pay is price — and what you buy is value.”

“Investing is about predicting the future, and the future is inherently unpredictable. Therefore, the only way you can do better is to assess all the facts and truly know what you know and know what you don't know. That's your probability edge.”

“Free market never succeeded without free men and free society.”

“I have three lovely children. They are beautiful, talented, and kind-hearted. I'm most proud of them. I love them so much that I will never want to burden them with a large amount of inherited wealth.”

“I was a college student in 1989 when I participated in the demonstration at Tiananmen Square. I was one of the organizers.”

“When I first came to Columbia University, I was dirt poor. I did not choose to come here - I just ended up here because I had nowhere else to go, having just escaped from China after Tiananmen.”

“Tremendous insight is built from intense curiosity and study for your whole life.”

“Most of your time being a value investor is as an academic, a researcher, a journalist actually, to have insatiable curiosity and try and figure out how just about everything works.”

“You have to be naturally interested and curious about everything – any kind of businesses, politics, science, technology, humanities, history, poetry, literature, everything really affects your business.”

“The game of investment is really continuous learning.”

“I feel very lucky that in the last twenty years I could study value investing under the tutelage of the great masters.”

“You prove to them you're good, people trust you. They don't ask how many years I've managed a fund. The question is, Can you make me money? Show me the money! This is one area where, if you really believe you're smart and you're unique and you're different, this can be challenging — this is it. Because if you're right, you make a lot. If you're wrong, you lose a bundle.”

“I'm not interested in revolution. I'm a capitalist. It was his capitalist aptitude that attracted me, not his revolutionary history.”

“My journey as a student of value investing has been especially meaningful to me on a personal level. In seeking a livelihood, I gate-crashed this profession by good fortune and without any forethought. Later, I realised I had stumbled upon something wondrous. This profession is an incredible thing. It lets you spend every minute studying new things. It won't just be your assets that grow through compounding; you will also feel your knowledge, practical experience and judgement compounding at the same time.”

“When I first came to Columbia University, I was dirt poor. I did not choose to come here — I just ended up here because I had nowhere else to go, having just escaped from China after Tiananmen. I was in a new country where I didn't understand the language, didn't know anybody, and didn't have a penny to my name. So I was desperate and afraid. In retrospect, that is good inspiration for trying to figure out how to make money!”

“My impression of the stock market was that of Shanghai in the 1930s as depicted by Cao Yu's play Sunrise — full of cunning deceits, luck and bloodshed.”

“He's changed. He was looking for a way to succeed mightily in the world. Li Lu is no longer a revolutionary. He's a capitalist. You can't find a more capitalistic capitalist than Li Lu.”

“The macro is what we must accept; the micro is where we can and should make a difference.”

“I am a survivor.”