You have to be willing to double down when you invest in the types of companies we invest in, where things often get worse well before they get better. I don't want to leave you with the impression, however, that it always works. In the late 1990s I had about a 12 percent portfolio position [...]

It's always been fairly easy for me to stay focused on the long term, but with 30 years' experience reinforcing the importance of that, it's easier to stay patient. In 2008 that patience didn't serve me so well. When the problems started to get attention, conviction that things would be fine in the medium to [...]

The downside of an industry cycle is a consistent reason why things get cheap. We’ll put a reasonable multiple on the normalized earnings power of the business over three to four years knowing it can take five or six and, given the types of things we look at, often come up with intrinsic values that [...]

We focus on smaller-cap companies that are largely ignored by Wall Street and face some sort of distress, of their own making or due to an industry cycle. These companies are more likely to be inefficiently priced and if you have conviction and a long-term view they can produce not 20 to 30 percent returns, [...]