Value investors will not invest in businesses that they cannot readily understand or ones they find excessively risky. Hence few value investors will own the shares of technology companies. Many also shun commercial banks, which they consider to have unanalyzable assets, as well as property and casualty insurance companies, which have both unanalyzable assets and liabilities.

My experience is that short sellers do far better analysis than long buyers because they have to. The market is biased upward over time-as the saying goes, stocks are for the long run.

Like to have a catalyst - reduces dependence on the market: Distressed debt inherently has a catalyst - maturity.

Investing today may well be harder than it has been at any time in our three decades of existence.

Do not trust financial market risk models. Despite the predilection of some analysts to model the financial markets using sophisticated mathematics, the markets are governed by behavioral science, not physical science.

We worry top-down, but we invest bottom-up

Ultimately, nothing should be more important to investors than the ability to sleep soundly at night.