The overwhelming majority of people are comfortable with consensus, but successful investors tend to have a contrarian bent.

A simple rule applies: if you don't quickly comprehend what a company is doing, then management probably doesn't either.

Sometimes buying early on the way down looks like being wrong, but it isn't.

While knowing how to value businesses is essential for investment success, the first and perhaps most important step in the investment process is knowing where to look for opportunities

The strategy of buying what's in favor is a fool's errand, ensuring long-term underperformance. Only by standing against the prevailing winds - selectively, but resolutely - can an investor prosper over time. But for a while, a value investor typically underperforms.

Below, we itemize some of the quite different lessons investors seem to have learned as of late 2009 - false lessons, we believe. To not only learn but also effectively implement investment lessons requires a disciplined, often contrary, and long-term-oriented investment approach. It requires a resolute focus on risk aversion rather than maximizing immediate returns, as well as an understanding of history, a sense of financial market cycles, and, at times, extraordinary patience.

Markets need not be in sync with one another. Simultaneously, the bond market can be priced for sustained tough times, the equity market for a strong recovery, and gold for high inflation. Such an apparent disconnect is indefinitely sustainable.