Anthony Bolton's top investment quotes - the definitive list

Buffett, Templeton, Keynes, Miller...they're all here!

Fidelity International today revealed Anthony Bolton's China Special Situations trust raised £460m in one of the UK market's most successful fund listings for decades.

Although this was £190m less than the maximum subscription, investment experts agree this will - and should - be viewed as a success for Bolton and Fidelity.

Over the last few weeks, IFAonline and Investment Week have brought you some of Bolton's all-time favourite investment quotes, as selected from the contrarian investor's 2009 book Investing Against The Tide.

But here we pull them all together in one, definitive list.

"You should invest in a business that even a fool can run, because someday a fool will." Warren Buffett

"You should look at stocks as small pieces of business." Warren Buffett

"One of your partners, named Mr Market, is very obliging indeed. Every day he tells you what he thinks your interest is worth and, furthermore, offers to buy you out or to sell you an additional interest on that basis. Sometimes his idea of value appears plausible and justified by business developments and prospects as you know them. Often, on the other hand, Mr Market lets his enthusiasm or his fears run away with him, and the value he proposes to you seems to you little short of silly." Ben Graham

"When an investor focuses on short-term investments, he or she is observing the variability of the portfolio, not the returns - in short, being fooled by randomness." Nassim Nicholas Taleb

"Even in such a time of madness as the late ‘20s, a great many men on Wall St remained quite sane. But they also remained very quiet. The sense of responsibility in the financial community as a whole is not small. It is nearly nil. Perhaps this is inherent. In a community where the primary concern is making money, one of the necessary rules is to live and let live. To speak out against madness may be to ruin those who succumb to it. So the wise in Wall St are nearly always silent. The foolish thus have the field to themselves." John K. Galbraith

"Probably the biggest intellectual problem an investor has to wrestle with is the constant barrage of noise and babble. Noise is extraneous, short-term information that is random and basically irrelevant to investment decision making. Babble is the chatter and opinions of the well-meaning, attractive talking heads who abound. The serious investor's monumental task is to distil this overwhelming mass of information and opinion into knowledge and then to extract investment meaning from it." Barton Biggs

"You pay a very high price for a cheery consensus. It won't be the economy that will do in investors; it will be the investors themselves. Uncertainty is actually the friend of the buyer of long-term values." Warren Buffett

"Everyone has the brainpower to make money in stocks. Not everyone has the stomach. If you are susceptible to selling everything in a panic, you ought to avoid stocks and mutual funds altogether." Peter Lynch

"We also believe candour benefits us as managers. The CEO who misleads often in public eventually misleads himself in private." Warren Buffett

"Stock price movements actually begin to reflect new developments before it is generally recognised that they have taken place." Arthur Zeikel

"The great personal fortunes in the country weren't built on a portfolio of fifty companies. They were built by someone who identified one wonderful business. With each investment you make, you should have the courage and the conviction to place at least 10% of your net worth in that stock." Warren Buffett

"Sell a stock only when you have found a new stock that is a 50% better bargain than the one that you hold." John Templeton

"Never invest in a company without understanding its finances. The biggest losses in stocks come from companies with poor balance sheets." Peter Lynch

"The truth is more important than the facts." Frank Lloyd Wright

"If we [the US in 2007] go into a recession we will come out of it. In any case, we have had only two recessions in the past 25 years, and they totalled 17 months. As long-term investors, we position portfolios for the 95% of the time the economy is growing, not the unforecastable 5% when it is not." Bill Miller

"Most investors want to do today what they should have done yesterday." Laurence H. Summers

"When management with a reputation for brilliance tackles a business with a reputation for bad economics, it is the reputation of the business that remains intact." Warren Buffett

"Getting to know the management of a company is like getting married. You never really know the girl until you live with her. Until you've lived with a management you don't really know them." Phil Fisher

"A stock doesn't know that you own it." Warren Buffett

"[My] central principle of investment is to go contrary to the general opinion, on the grounds that if everyone agreed about its merit, the investment is inevitably too dear and therefore unattractive." John Maynard Keynes

"Cash is a fact, profit is an opinion." Alfred Rappaport
"We average down relentlessly. Two things seem pretty clear to me: first, no one can consistently buy at the low or sell at the high (except liars, as Bernard Baruch said), and second, lowest average cost wins. We constantly strive to lower the average cost of our positions by buying more if and when the price drops." Bill Miller

"In markets, everyone tends to see the same things, read the same newspapers and get the same data feeds. The only way to arrive at a different answer from everybody else is to organise the data in different ways or bring to the analytical process things that are not typically present. As I have often remarked, if it's in the newspapers, it's in the price." Bill Miller

"The four most costly words in investment are: ‘this time is different'." Sir John Templeton