The way we make money as a group is that we don't pay a lot for anything, and most of the stocks we buy have low expectations.

I think the exercise of trying to figure out how to simplify concepts has been incredibly helpful to me over the last 13 years of teaching and I hope my students have benefited from it.

The way we make money as a group is that we don't pay a lot for anything, and most of the stocks we buy have low expectations.

Look down, not up, when making your initial investment decision. If you don’t lose money, most of the remaining alternatives are good ones.

Value investing strategies have worked for years and everyone's known about them. They continue to work because it's hard for people to do, for two main reasons. First, the companies that show up on the screens can be scary and not doing so well, so people find them difficult to buy. Second, there can be one-, two- or three-year periods when a strategy like this doesn't work. Most people aren't capable of sticking it out through that.

If you spend your energies looking for and analysing situations not closely followed by other informed investors, your chance of finding bargains greatly increases.

It just seems logical that sticking to investing in only a small number of companies that you understand well, rather than moving down the list to your thirtieth or fiftieth favorite pick, would create a much greater potential to earn above-average investment returns.