If the growth rate is so good that in another ten years the company might well have quadrupled, is it really of such great concern whether at the moment the stock might or might not be 35% overpriced?

History has shown that in every age and in every field of human knowledge, many of the views which almost everyone accepted as true and never bothered to think about further, were in time proven completely wrong.

I had made what I believe was one of the more valuable decisions of my business life. This was to confine all efforts solely to making major gains in the long-run.

I remember my sense of shock some half-dozen years ago when I read a recommendation to sell shares of a company ... The recommendation was not based on any long-term fundamentals. Rather, it was that over the next six months the funds could be employed more profitably elsewhere.

Of one thing the investor can be certain: A large company's need to bring in a new chief executive from the outside is a damning sign of something basically wrong with the existing management - no matter how good the surface signs may have been as indicated by the most recent earnings statement.

One, which I mention several times elsewhere, is the need for patience if big profits are to be made from investment. Put another way, it is often easier to tell what will happen to the price of a stock than how much time will elapse before it happens. The other is the inherently deceptive nature of the stock market. Doing what everybody else is doing at the moment, and therefore what you have an almost irresistible urge to do, is often the wrong thing to do at all.

Practical investors usually learn their problem is finding enough outstanding investments, rather than choosing among too many.