“Buy High today, Sell Higher (hopefully) tomorrow”.

It’s the ‘bigger sucker’ mentality. When you buy, you are potentially someone else’s ‘sucker’ though…

I think what Templeton was doing was determining a companies value based on his own measurements and only buying stocks relative to his own ‘value’ (not the current market price). So, in his mind ‘Buy low’, meant buying shares for less than what he thought they were worth — value investing. That would change the phrase to be:

“Buy for lower price than what you think it is worth, Sell for higher price than what you think it is worth”

For anyone not doing their own calculations — it really is just ‘bigger sucker’ investing…

Nice gains BTW!

Don’t run with the herd, says #3, if you seek superior performance. That’s a worthy piece of wisdom. In other words, be something of a contrarian to find value before most others find that value. Stay ahead of the stampede and profit.

He is not telling you that you can sell at the very top and at the best price at this moment or buy at the very bottom and at the cheapest price.
But this is not what you are trying to do.

Sure, at this moment in time when you buy, you are paying more than others — but if you look at the spread between bid and ask you’ll see that the difference is quite small. But you aren’t planning to sell at this moment in time, you buy because based on the business, earning potential, P/E, you expect the value to be higher at some point in future. Similarly, if you sell it at this point — sure it may be for the lowest price at this moment of time, but it is can still be higher than what you bought it for. So I don’t understand your point.

Plenty of people, for example, bought in March this year when everyone was selling. I bought a few things here and there – less than I would’ve wished, but it’s really hard emotionally to go against the sentiment. I sold a couple of things I bought in March. Yes, it was below top, but I still made money. In fact I made a mistake with one stock and sold too early. So? I still made almost 50% in one month. Plenty of average people were smart enough to sell certain tech stocks around the internet bubble burst – I know several personally. Sure those who bought in March didn’t buy at the lowest point, much as many of those who sold in 2001 or 1999 didn’t sell at the very top. But you aren’t trying to predict exact top or bottom, you are just trying to maximize your returns over a period of time.

#17–of course! How simple, but really never thought of that way

But I think he was missing the point. When you ‘buy’ you are paying more than anyone else is, since the market is basically a large open auction. On the other side, “sell high” is just as impossible, because to sell a stock you were the one who parted with it for the lowest price.