Our capital management philosophy is based upon a hybrid value investing model falling somewhere between Benjamin Graham and Philip Fisher.  Our primary objective is to reduce the potential for loss by focusing on businesses that generate consistent cash flows, are trading at an attractive valuation, and have management teams in place that have demonstrated shareholder friendly behavior.  In virtually all cases, with the exception of some of our special operations such as arbitrage or proprietary trading activities, we hold our publicly traded investments for years and, in a few cases, perhaps even decades.

In other words, our goal is to find places to put money to work that will continue to grow on behalf of our shareholders year after year.  For many, this approach has the excitement of watching paint dry.  For us, we think the action is in the power of long-term compounding and are perfectly content to profit from the underlying operations of a company rather than financial engineering or aggressive trading.  We’d rather spend our time reading 10K filings, visiting friends, or considering new expansion opportunities than staring at ticker tape all day, growing distraught over what Graham called, “other peoples’ mistakes in judgment”.