Why should the immediate opportunity set be the only one considered, when tomorrow's may well be considerably more fertile than today's?

As Buffett has often observed, value investing is not a concept that can be learned and gradually applied over time. It is either absorbed and adopted at once, or it is never truly learned.

Great investments don't just knock on the door and say "buy me".

Investors should always keep in mind that the most important metric is not the returns achieved but the returns weighed against the risks incurred. Ultimately, nothing should be more important to investors than the ability to sleep soundly at night.

We buy expecting to hold a bond to maturity and a stock forever.

When you buy bargains and they become better bargains, it is easy to start to question yourself, which can impair your judgement. Real or imagined concerns about client redemptions, employee defections can greatly influence behavior away from rational.

When excesses such as lax lending standards become widespread and persist for some time, people are lulled into a false sense of security, creating an even more dangerous situation. In some cases, excesses migrate beyond regional or national borders, raising the ante for investors and governments. These excesses will eventually end, triggering a crisis at least in proportion to the degree of the excesses. Correlations between asset classes may be surprisingly high when leverage rapidly unwinds.