“I buy stocks when the lemmings are headed the other way.”
Warren Buffett knows the time to buy a stock is when everyone else is selling it—not when everyone else is buying it. All the great Buffett buys have been on bad news—he likes to buy when things look darkest—and he can do that because he has studied the world of business and knows which businesses will survive the adversity that has brought them to the edge of the abyss and which ones will go on and take the plunge into corporate oblivion. His big buys were during the bear markets of 1966, when he bought into Disney; in 1973, when he bought into the Washington Post Company; in 1981, when he bought into General Foods; in 1987, when he bought into Coca-Cola; and in 1990, when he bought into Wells Fargo.