In the past, developed markets traded at a premium to emerging markets; we had a stable political system, a stable and more diverse economy. That premium was earned, not given. And it is quietly eroding.

Some things are within our power — our values, our character, our decisions — and some aren’t. We can control what we do. We cannot control when the stock market will stop pricing fast-growing companies as priceless and slower-growing companies as worthless.

The right decisions usually come with a certain amount of discomfort, and for good reason: you are making them against the grain of the market. Selling when everyone else is excited and enthusiastic is incredibly difficult.

DCF is a foundational concept of the valuation of a company or any asset that generates or will generate cash flows in the future.

A dollar in seven years is worth less than a dollar in your pocket today. So you need to discount all these cash flows at an appropriate rate back into today’s dollars. This tells you how much the cow is worth.

Diversification is the only free lunch an investor will ever get, as risk reduction doesn’t need to lead to subsequent reduction in return.

The story of Noah’s Ark comes to mind: gather two of every kind to survive the flood. This is how Wall Street and academia approach diversification; but as Warren Buffett put it, that’s how you create a zoo. We are not in the zoo business, just intent on picking the right animals.

Equity returns come from the sum of three variables: earnings growth, P/E change and dividends. Focusing exclusively on dividend yield causes investors to ignore earnings growth and valuation changes.

In the quest for value, we seek gems that have collected the dust of confusion and misunderstanding.

You can explain economic growth with a simple formula: growth in the employed population plus productivity growth.

We focus on the endurance (survival) strategy.

One of the most difficult parts of being an investor is not the fluctuation of IQ but the volatility of your own EQ.

A company’s fair value is a range of values, which may change as facts and our view of the future change.

My objective is not to buy at the ‘bottom’ and sell at the ‘top.’ My objective is to buy a great company when it is cheap and to sell it when it is fairly valued!

A fiduciary must put your interests above their own.

They are playing Fool’s Gambit — waiting for a greater fool to buy their overvalued stock from them. It is just a meme, a speculative gambling instrument used by one fool in search of an even greater fool.

Free Cash Flows (operating cash flows less capital expenditures) — is very important for several reasons.

Buy into our philosophy — we are the ‘getting rich slowly’ people.

A good company becomes a good stock at a certain price, not at every price. If tomorrow it started trading at $500 (100 times my approximate EPS estimates) it would still be a great company, just not a great stock.

Any creative activity that brings us long-term happiness has friction, which is often accompanied by pain, which is what we usually call problems. I call them good problems.