[Blue Ridge Capital's] John Griffin, one of the few investors who is really good at shorting, says you always want time to be on your side with shorts. Taking that to heart, our primary focus on the short side is on identifying secular problems that over the cycle are working against a given company. We [...]

Being concentrated doesn't mean we'll just take the 15 best ideas we have and plug them into our portfolio. Because of that level of concentration, the companies we choose will overall likely be less cyclical, with more stable underlying business models. We at the margin will be less apt to hold names with higher expected [...]

In general we're not obsessed with seeing near-term catalysts if those are clear, the stock is probably 30 percent higher. But it obviously matters when things return to normal, so we judge everything based on an internal rate of return. If we can't reasonably expect a return to normal in both earnings and the multiple [...]

In traditional-value ideas we're looking for a large discount to our estimate of value based on a company's normal earnings power, where normal means that general business activity is not too hot and not too cold. These tend to be more average-quality businesses, which can get very cheap in the down part of a cycle [...]