Early on, people invested in me because of my letters and then, somehow, after they invested, they stopped reading them.

Early on, people invested in me because of my letters and then, somehow, after they invested, they stopped reading them.

Everything I do in investment is just very different.

It is ludicrous to believe that asset bubbles can only be recognized in hindsight.

Sometimes markets err big time. Markets erred when they gave America Online the currency to buy Time Warner. They erred when they bet against George Soros and for the British pound. And they are erring right now by continuing to float along as if the most significant credit bubble history has ever seen does not exist. Opportunities are rare, and large opportunities on which one can put nearly unlimited capital to work at tremendous potential returns are even more rare. Selectively shorting the most problematic mortgage-backed securities in history today amounts to just such an opportunity.

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.