However, if one has been playing the buy-and-hold game with quality securities, one has been exposed to a substantial amount of market risk because the valuations placed on these securities have implied overly rosy scenarios prone to popular revision in times of more realistic expectation. This is one of those times, but it is my feeling that the revisions have not been severe enough, the expectations not yet realistic enough. Hence, the world's best companies largely remain overpriced in the marketplace.

In essence, the stock market represents three separate categories of business. They are, adjusted for inflation, those with shrinking intrinsic value, those with approximately stable intrinsic value, and those with steadily growing intrinsic value. The preference, always, would be to buy a long-term franchise at a substantial discount from growing intrinsic value.

My positioning with my investors was always, I need three to five years.

I didn't offer transparency. I provided one quarterly report in letter form. That was all you got. I basically demanded that if you're going to invest in my fund you need to accept my terms. The terms not being super highs, but just, I'm not going to cater to you.

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.

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

The late 90s almost forced me to identify myself as a value investor, because I thought what everybody else was doing was insane.