If you distilled investing legend Warren Buffett’s philosophy down to a few words, it’d likely be as simple as “buy and hold.” The chairman of Berkshire Hathaway (BRK.B) (BRK.A) thinks that day trading is a fool's game, and chasing trends is a great way to end up holding the bag. Nothing exemplifies this better than what he told investors in his 1996 letter to shareholders, “If you aren’t willing to own a stock for ten years, don’t even think about owning it for ten minutes.”
Buffett believed that buying a stock should feel no different than buying a business. If you wouldn’t be comfortable owning the entire company through good years and bad, market crashes and boring stretches, then you have no business owning a sliver of it just because the price might move tomorrow. The stock market, in his view, wasn’t a casino. It was a place to acquire ownership in productive assets.
