I love learning about businesses and the intellectual challenge of investing. I'm also intensely competitive about generating great returns. I love that you get a scorecard at the end of the day and I love to win. Winning to me is looking back after 30 years and saying, “Wow, look at that track record these [...]

and the earnings that are reported and people are using to value the stock. It could be accounting related, so we pay careful attention to things like rising accounts receivable relative to total sales, cash from operations that is not keeping pace with net income, and decreasing returns on capital. We also look for long-term [...]

Without having a commitment to the short side, it's difficult to be offensive when you should be. The highest-return opportunities are available when markets are in free fall, but if you're getting shelled, you may not have the emotional conviction to be aggressively opportunistic, and you may not even be able to do it, because [...]

We often take R&D positions in stocks [before completely finishing our research]. Action adds a sense of urgency to the work there are so many things to look at in this business that things can fall through the cracks unless you force yourself to focus. Having capital on the books does that. When we find [...]

Often there are specific issues central to our thesis that we need to better understand. To own Oracle, for example, we needed to believe that it was integrating its many acquisitions in a more customer-friendly way than just ramming its own products down acquired customers' throats, which was a concern of the Street's. We also [...]

Since the crisis there are fewer fundamental long-term investors in the market. It's bots, or traders, playing a game on the next quarter's earnings, or people making thematic macro bets. As a result, the market is assigning less value to the durability and consistent growth of cash flow, which is why quality stocks have increasingly [...]