I've got a full quota of righteous indignation and a lot of things turn me off about corporate America, but I've never had the personality for being confrontational. I talk to management at times, both to complain and to offer suggestions, but I'm hesitant to be public or loud about it. If I pushed on [...]
Given that our funds are concentrated both in the absolute number of positions we hold and in the number of industries that are represented, it's natural for our performance to be lumpy. If the alternative is being consistent but mediocre, we would much prefer to be streaky but good.
One lesson from 2008 was that we were guilty of having a failure of imagination on the downside. We develop a base, high, and low case for each business we analyze and one practical adjustment we've made is to make our low cases somewhat more draconian. That comes into play in what we're willing to [...]
We try to figure out what a rational, informed buyer would pay for the whole business. We'd expect that kind of buyer to base the price on how much cash the business would generate over the next 15 to 20 years in excess of what's needed to run the business, so true free cash flow. [...]
When a company has integrity issues, there's no firm ground. If somebody is willing to do the medium-size crime you know about, there's no particular reason they wouldn't have done the bigger crime you haven't found out about yet.
In many cases we’re getting involved when a rapidly growing company is slowing down or maturing. There’s a changing of the guard among theshareholder base and as that happens, there’s often a disagreement over how quickly the growth is slowing and whether the slowdown is permanent. When you’re right that the market is overreacting to [...]