Value investing is at its core the marriage of a contrarian streak and a calculator.

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

Macro worries are like sports talk radio. Everyone has a good opinion which probably means that none of them are good.

Right at the core, the mainstream has it backwards. Warren Buffett often quips that the first rule of investing is to not lose money, and the second rule is to not forget the first rule. Yet few investors approach the world with such a strict standard of risk avoidance.

In a rising market, everyone makes money and a value philosophy is unnecessary. But because there is no certain way to predict what the market will do, one must follow a value philosophy at all times.

We are big fans of fear, and in investing it is clearly better to be scared than sorry.

Gold is unique because it has the age-old aspect of being viewed as a store of value. Nevertheless, it’s still a commodity and has no tangible value, and so I would say that gold is a speculation. But because of my fear about the potential debasing of paper money and about paper money not being a store of value, I want some exposure to gold.