Warren Buffett says, 'If you’re worried about corrections, you shouldn’t own stocks'

Legendary investor Warren Buffett is the Chairperson of Berkshire Hathaway.

Legendary investor Warren Buffett has always advocated ignoring the short-term ups and downs in the stock market and focusing on being a long-term investor. Although his company, Berkshire Hathaway, had slashed its stake in Apple by almost 50 percent as part of a massive selling spree ahead of a stock market crash, the 93-year-old firmly believes that investing is for the long haul.

“If you’re worried about corrections, you shouldn’t own stocks,” Buffett said in a 2015 interview with The Street. “It’s a terrible mistake to think of stocks as something that bob up and down and that you should pay attention to those bobs up and down.”

He added that if you’re saving for a long-term goal, such as retirement or buying a house, what happens on a particular day or week or year shouldn’t be of much concern.

“It’s going to go down sometimes, if you own a stock, so why worry about it?” Buffett told the publication. “The point is to buy something you like at a price you like, and then hold it for 20 years. You should not look at it day-to-day.”

Speaking to CNBC, the Oracle of Omaha advised long-term investors to own a diversified portfolio of low-cost index funds because it makes “the most sense practically all of the time".

“Consistently buy an S&P 500 low-cost index fund,” Warren Buffett said in a 2017 interview. “Keep buying it through thick and thin, and especially through thin.”

More recently, at Berkshire Hathaway's annual shareholder meeting in May, Buffett said he wasn’t in a rush to spend “unless we think we’re doing something that has very little risk and can make us a lot of money.”