Everyone has heard the Buffett quote:  “It’s far better to buy a wonderful company at a fair price than a fair company at a wonderful price.”

It’s one of those quotes that gets repeated so often the real message gets mistaken for “if you just do this easy thing, you’ll make a lot of money.” The problem isn’t that it’s hard to buy great companies. It really is easy. You can do it anytime. The hard part is buying them at a fair price. Here’s Graham: Continue Reading…

Long before search engines there was Yahoo!. It was the directory – started as a list of Jerry Yang’s and David Filo’s favorite sites – for the internet before Google took over the world. There was competition – AltaVista, Infoseek, Lycos, and a long list of others – but Yahoo! was it. Anyone who grew up during the internet boom knew about it and used it and, I bet, many secretly still use it today.

But what really made Yahoo! stand out at that time, was something few internet companies ever attained. Profits! It was profitable by the end of 1996. A truly rare feat. It was a dot-com darling at the time, peaking around a $125 billion market cap. This 1999 Fortune article sums up the period well. Continue Reading…

The search for the best returns possible hasn’t changed in centuries. There’s a need to “beat the market” or your peers. It’s human nature. But how you go about doing it is the question.

In 1988 speech, Charlie Ellis explained that superior results are only gained in one of three ways: Continue Reading…