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.

Value investing doesn't always work. The market doesn't always agree with you. Over time, value is roughly the way the market prices stocks, but over the short term, which sometimes can be as long as two or three years, there are periods when it doesn't work. And that is a very good thing. The fact that our value approach doesn't work over periods of time is precisely the reason why it continues to work over the long term.

There's a clarity that comes with great ideas: You can [easily and simply] explain why something's a great business, how and why it's cheap, why it's cheap for temporary reasons and how, on a normal basis, it should be trading at a much higher level. You're never sitting there on the 40th page of your spreadsheet, as Buffett would say, agonizing over whether you should buy or not.

If I plug my estimates into the Magic Formula, and it comes out cheap, that's good.

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

We are busy surviving, herding, fixating on what just happened, and being overconfident!

The secret to investing is to figure out the value of something - and then pay a lot less.