There’s a virtuous cycle when people have to defend challenges to their ideas. Any gaps in thinking or analysis become clear pretty quickly when smart people ask good, logical questions. You can’t be a good value investor without being an independent thinker – you’re seeing valuations that the market is not appreciating. But it’s critical that you understand why the market isn’t seeing the value you do. The back and forth that goes on in the investment process helps you get at that.

Choosing individual stocks without any idea of what you're looking for is like running through a dynamite factory with a burning match. You may live, but you're still an idiot.

I don't know too many people that are good at timing the market relative to macro-economic events.

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.

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.

I wait until an investment idea is so good, it hits me over the head like an anvil.

The more confidence I have in each one of my stock picks, the fewer companies I need to own in my portfolio to feel comfortable.