David Einhorn Quotations

Both poker and investing are games of incomplete information. You have a certain set of facts and you are looking for situations where you have an edge, whether the edge is psychological or statistical.

My goal is to get home every day in time for dinner with the family - and then we play with the kids for a while, and then I go to bed around the time they do and sleep from nine to three or nine to four. It's the same six hours everyone else gets. I'd just rather do my e-mails and my reading in the morning rather than late at night, that's all.

During my freshman year at Cornell, I joined my dorm's intramural football team. At the first practice, upper classmen pointed out I was tall, so I should try playing QB. Well half an hour later, it was abundantly clear that I should not be the QB.

Microsoft could help Facebook with one of the biggest challenges, namely monetizing its traffic without reducing the user's experience. It's obvious that Microsoft needs traffic and Facebook needs search.

My father and grandfather were businessmen. The family business was Adelphi Paints in New Jersey. When the first energy crisis came in the early 1970s, the business suffered.

I rooted for the Milwaukee Brewers and its stars, Robin Yount and Paul Molitor. I went to a lot of games, including the World Series in 1982. The Brewers may have been a bad team for most of my life, but to have your team at its peak when you are thirteen years old is an experience I wish for every fan.

I spent most of high school working on the debate team, probably at some expense to my grades. Being a member of the team was great training in critical analysis, organization, and logic.

There's more at risk in what happens in Microsoft than I could ever bet on a poker table.

I've got a fantasy-baseball team with my brother. But I have to admit, he does all the work.

Texas hold 'em is all about folding and waiting for that time that comes up every hour or two where you actually have an advantage and you can press it.

On my best days, I fancy myself a combination of Dad's persistence/patience and Mom's toughness/skepticism.

Ive got a fantasy-baseball team with my brother. But I have to admit, he does all the work.

Microsoft has one more shot at a role in smart phone software through its deployment on Nokia phones. Nokia is still the global market share leader in cell phones. Maybe it will work out, but this is hard to envision great success in the area coming on the heels of so much disappointment in missed opportunity in this important and visible category.

What is uncertain is how much further the bubble can expand, and what might pop it.

I will keep a substantial long exposure to gold -- which serves as a Jelly Donut antidote for my portfolio. While I'd love for our leaders to adopt sensible policies that would reduce the tail risks so that I could sell our gold, one nice thing about gold is that it doesn't even have quarterly conference calls.

A 99% Value-at-Risk calculation does not evaluate what happens in the last one percent... This is like an airbag that works all the time, except when you have a car accident.

When you leave a good job to go off on your own and don't expect to make money for a while, you name the firm whatever your wife says you should.

What do you call a stock that's down 90%? A stock that was down 80% and then got cut in half.

When people ask me what I do for a living, I generally tell them 'I run a hedge fund.' The majority give me a strange look, so I quickly add, 'I am a money manager.' When the strange look persists, as it often does, I correct it to simply, 'I'm an investor.' Everyone knows what that is.

You have a certain set of facts and you are looking for situations where you have an edge, whether the edge is psychological or statistical.

The loss was not bad luck. It was bad analysis.

In the real world, illiquid assets carry a discount.

One of the best investors around, Joel Greenblatt, has written a popular, charming and funny book about investing in great companies at low P/E multiples. To simplify an already simple book, great companies are generally measured as companies that can generate lots of profit without requiring a lot of capital. This means that they have high ROEs.

As an investor my job is to figure out what will happen rather than what should happen.