When people ask me what I do for a living, I generally tell them 'I run a hedge fund.' The majority give me a strange look, so I quickly add, 'I am a money manager.' When the strange look persists, as it often does, I correct it to simply, 'I'm an investor.' Everyone knows what that is.

A 99% Value-at-Risk calculation does not evaluate what happens in the last one percent... This is like an airbag that works all the time, except when you have a car accident.

I will keep a substantial long exposure to gold -- which serves as a Jelly Donut antidote for my portfolio. While I'd love for our leaders to adopt sensible policies that would reduce the tail risks so that I could sell our gold, one nice thing about gold is that it doesn't even have quarterly conference calls.

In the real world, illiquid assets carry a discount.

When you leave a good job to go off on your own and don't expect to make money for a while, you name the firm whatever your wife says you should.

You have a certain set of facts and you are looking for situations where you have an edge, whether the edge is psychological or statistical.

One of the best investors around, Joel Greenblatt, has written a popular, charming and funny book about investing in great companies at low P/E multiples. To simplify an already simple book, great companies are generally measured as companies that can generate lots of profit without requiring a lot of capital. This means that they have high ROEs.