6 key investing tips from Warren Buffett to start the New Year on a positive note

livemint.com:

As the New Year has kicked off on a positive note with market indices touching all time highs, most investors are curious to explore investing opportunities from their closed ones and acquaintances, while some try to make sense of the volatility of what Benjamin Graham referred to as ‘Mr market’.

Learning the tricks of the trade may be a far-fetched goal for most, but making money, in fact, calls for learning merely the basics – assert some of the doyens such as Warren Buffett. 

He once said, “It’s amazing how hard people make what is a simple game. But of course, if they told everybody what a simple game it was, 90 percent of the income of the people that were speaking would disappear."

So, let us understand what key investing tips the Oracle of Omaha has given to the investors.

These are the six key investing lessons to learn this year from Warren Buffett.

Focus on the forest, forget the trees: In 2018 letter to shareholders, he wrote that investors should focus on the forest of (in reference to a corporate group) instead of the details of many and diverse businesses the group may be running. If the group is fine, there is no need to evaluate each tree individually to evaluate the future potential of your investment.

Focus on earnings not adjusted earnings: He pointed out that some companies feature 'adjusted EBITDA' in their presentations instead of 'EBITDA' to exclude a variety of costs.

For example, managers sometimes assert that their company's stock-based compensation should not be counted as an expense. On this, he quotes Abraham Lincoln to say: «If you call a dog's tail a leg, how many legs does it have? Four because calling a tail does not make it one,» he wrote in the letter to shareholders in 2018.

Being cash