Fortune magazine recently had an interesting article about how successful people work and one of the people they spoke with was Wynton Marsalis, the great jazz trumpeter. He said that if you want to be able to find a groove, you have to practice, practice, practice. You've got to know the scales and you've got [...]

We pay a lot of attention to dotting our i's and crossing our t's when it comes to the fundamentals of finding opportunities that are “safe, cheap and good,” because we think it makes it easier to reframe things in new, flexible ways. One problem with value investors is that they can often become ideologues. [...]

We're probably more focused than the typical equity investor on staying power.Spreadsheets make everything look linear and controlled, but the real world oscillates, overshoots, collapses, and rebounds. A company with operational and financial flexibility what we mean by staying power is able to exercise options that are quite valuable at different points in the cycle. [...]

We tend to like equity ideas that have almost bond-like qualities, where cash is being generated in a fairly predictable way and being used to pay down debt or return capital to shareholders through dividends or stock buybacks. Companies in growth mode, reinvesting all of their cash, are more like zero-coupon bonds and are more [...]