Smoke a free cigar

"My cigar-butt strategy worked very well while I was managing small sums. Indeed, the many dozens of free puffs I obtained in the 1950s made that decade by far the best of my life for relative and absolute investment performance." That's Warren Buffett speaking in the 2014 edition of his annual letter to his company shareholders. The 'cigar butt strategy' is a colourful (if a little dated) colloquial investment term from Wall Street which refers to someone picking up the butt of a smoked cigar from a pavement and then relighting it to get a few free puffs. This is akin to buying a very cheap, apparently worthless stock that no one is willing to pick up and somehow getting some gains out of it. This activity is also called penny sto