When I stand on my special-issue "Intelligent Investor" ladder and peer out over the frenzied crowd, I see very few others doing the same. Many stocks remain overvalued, and speculative excess - both on the upside and on the downside - is embedded in the frenzy around stocks of all stripes. And yes, I am talking about March 2001, not March 2000.

The late 90s almost forced me to identify myself as a value investor, because I thought what everybody else was doing was insane.

My positioning with my investors was always, I need three to five years.

If you are going to be a great investor, you have to fit the style to who you are.

I have always believed that a single talented analyst, working very hard, can cover an amazing amount of investment landscape, and this belief remains unchallenged in my mind.

In essence, the stock market represents three separate categories of business. They are, adjusted for inflation, those with shrinking intrinsic value, those with approximately stable intrinsic value, and those with steadily growing intrinsic value. The preference, always, would be to buy a long-term franchise at a substantial discount from growing intrinsic value.

Everything I do in investment is just very different.