My rather puritanical view is that any investment manager, whether operating as broker, investment counselor of a trust department, investment company, etc., should be willing to state unequivocally what he is going to attempt to accomplish and how he proposes to measure the extent to which he gets the job done.

We really can say no in 10 seconds or so to 90%+ of all the things that come along simply because we have these filters.

The Noah rule: Predicting rain doesn't count; building arks does.

I know what I want to do and it makes sense to get going.

Investment students need only two well-taught courses - How to Value a Business and How to Think About Market Prices

The strategy we've adopted precludes our following standard diversification dogma. Many pundits would therefore say the strategy must be riskier than that employed by more conventional investors. We disagree. We believe that a policy of portfolio concentration may well decrease risk if it raises, as it should, both the intensity with which an investor thinks about a business and the comfort-level he must feel with its economic characteristics before buying into it.

Take the probability of loss times the amount of possible loss from the probability of gain times the amount of possible gain. That is what we're trying to do. It's imperfect, but that's what it's all about.