Pay Attention…and It Will Pay You. Concentrate on everything when you are playing/trading. Watch and listen; remember to do both and relate the two.

Understand When to Play Aggressively…It’s the Winning Way. Don’t be a tight or a loose player/trader; be a solid one and recognize when it is time to press your bets/positions. To attain superior returns in poker and investing over the long run, grind it out (in stocks until you are up 30%-40%, and then if you have convictions, go for a 100% year). If you can avoid losing and put together a few 100% years, you can achieve outstanding long-term investment performance.

Tells: Look For Them and You Will Find Them. Poker players and stock markets have tells — giveaway moves that are very revealing. Learn to recognize them. History is your textbook.

ESP…It’s a Jellyroll. In those rare instances when all your card knowledge and market judgment/knowledge leaves you in doubt, go with your strong feelings and not against it.

Honor: A Gambler/Trader’s Ace-in-the-Hole. A good reputation and respect from others will put you in good stead.

Be as Competitive as You Can Be. Go into a poker game and into a trade with the idea of completely destroying your opponent or scoring a major investment coup. If you win a pot or make a successful trade, nearly always play the next pot or make the next trade shortly thereafter — within reason. Although the cards and trades might break even in the long run, rushes do happen and momentum often feeds upon itself. When you earn the right to be aggressive, you should be aggressive. When one has a tremendous conviction in a poker hand or trade, you have to go for the jugular.

Art and Science…It takes Both. Both activities are more art than science — that’s why they are so difficult to master. Knowing what to do is about 10% of the game. Knowing how to do it is the other 90%.

Money Management. The same sound principles of money control apply to the business of tournament/professional poker and to successful investing. The way to build long-term returns or poker winnings is through preservation of capital and home runs.

The Important Twins of Poker/Investing, Patience and Staying Power. Come to the poker table or to the markets with enough time to stay and play for a while.

Alertness is a Key. You must stay alert at all times.

So is Discipline.

Never Let Your Mind Dwell on Personal Problems. Never play/trade when you are upset. Make a conscious and constant effort to discover any leaks in your play, and then eliminate them.

Control Your Emotions. Allowing your confidence to be shaken can turn a simple losing streak into a terrible case of going bad. Keep your emotions in check. When you lose a pot or make a poor investment decision, get up, walk around the chair or take some deep breaths. Don’t lose your poise. If a trade or poker hand does not work out, walk away from the position/hand. Be confident enough about your ability to win afterwards.

1. “Rule No.1: Never lose money. Rule No.2: Never forget rule No.1″

2. “In a bull market, one must avoid the error of the preening duck that quacks boastfully after a torrential rainstorm, thinking that its paddling skills have caused it to rise in the world. A right-thinking duck would instead compare its position after the downpour to that of the other ducks on the pond.”

3. “The fact that people will be full of greed, fear or folly is predictable. The sequence is not predictable.”

4. “Be fearful when others are greedy. Be greedy when others are fearful.”

5. “It’s far better to buy a wonderful company at a fair price than a fair company at a wonderful price.”

6. “When a management with a reputation for brilliance tackles a business with a reputation for bad economics, it is usually the reputation of the business that remains intact.”

7. “You only find out who is swimming naked when the tide goes out.”

8. “Risk comes from not knowing what you’re doing.”

9. “If I was running $1 million today, or $10 million for that matter, I’d be fully invested. Anyone who says that size does not hurt investment performance is selling. The highest rates of return I’ve ever achieved were in the 1950s. I killed the Dow. You ought to see the numbers. But I was investing peanuts then. It’s a huge structural advantage not to have a lot of money. I think I could make you 50% a year on $1 million. No, I know I could. I guarantee that.”

10. “Whether we’re talking about socks or stocks, I like buying quality merchandise when it is marked down.”

11. “I try to buy stock in businesses that are so wonderful that an idiot can run them. Because sooner or later, one will.”

12. “Price is what you pay. Value is what you get.”

13. “I don’t look to jump over 7-foot bars: I look around for 1-foot bars that I can step over.”

14. “If a business does well, the stock eventually follows.”

15. “Look at market fluctuations as your friend rather than your enemy; profit from folly rather than participate in it.”

16. “Most people get interested in stocks when everyone else is. The time to get interested is when no one else is. You can’t buy what is popular and do well.”

17. “The line separating investment and speculation, which is never bright and clear, becomes blurred still further when most market participants have recently enjoyed triumphs. Nothing sedates rationality like large doses of effortless money. After a heady experience of that kind, normally sensible people drift into behavior akin to that of Cinderella at the ball. They know that overstaying the festivities — that is, continuing to speculate in companies that have gigantic valuations relative to the cash they are likely to generate in the future — will eventually bring on pumpkins and mice. But they nevertheless hate to miss a single minute of what is one helluva party. Therefore, the giddy participants all plan to leave just seconds before midnight. There’s a problem, though: They are dancing in a room in which the clocks have no hands.”

18. “Should you find yourself in a chronically leaking boat, energy devoted to changing vessels is likely to be more productive than energy devoted to patching leaks.”

19. “Never count on making a good sale. Have the purchase price be so attractive that even a mediocre sale gives good results.”

20. “Investors making purchases in an overheated market need to recognize that it may often take an extended period for the value of even an outstanding company to catch up with the price they paid.”

21. “I like to go for cinches. I like to shoot fish in a barrel. But I like to do it after the water has run out.”

22. “We don’t get paid for activity, just for being right. As to how long we’ll wait, we’ll wait indefinitely.”

23. “In the business world, the rearview mirror is always clearer than the windshield.”

24. “The investor of today does not profit from yesterday’s growth.”

25. “Someone’s sitting in the shade today because someone planted a tree a long time ago.”

Great investing advice as always from Warren Buffett. And, in spirit of the market crisis, we wanted to toss this nice bonus quote in as well: “When you combine ignorance and leverage, you get some pretty interesting results. ” Some of the investment banks (and even Warren himself) should have listened to that sound advice.

To learn more about Buffett and his investing ways, we highly recommend perusing the following reads:

- The Essays of Warren Buffett by the Oracle himself: Lessons from Warren Buffett over the years.

- The Warren Buffett Way by Robert Hagstrom: Outline of Buffett’s tenets for investing.

- The Intelligent Investor by Benjamin Graham. If you had to own one book about value investing, this would most likely be it. Benjamin Graham was a legendary investor who helped pioneer the ways of value investing and taught Warren Buffett a lot of what he knows today.

- Security Analysis by Graham & Dodd (a staple on our fundamentals recommended list): Hands down THE book on fundamental analysis. Also authored by Buffett’s mentor.

- The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life by Alice Schroeder. She was hand picked by Buffett to be his biographer.