There’s no magic bullet to finding ideas –the tools available are there for everyone to use. Good ideas generally come from individual curiosity and then creativity around what could be done with the business. The real value we can add is having conviction about what we think prospective earnings power is and why.

Michael McConnell, 7.31.07

没有魔术弹可以产生每个人都可以用的点子。好点子通常来源于个人的好奇心和关注企业的创造性。我们所说的真正的价值是深信我们认为的预期收益是多少和为什么会这样。

There’s a clarity that comes with great ideas: You can explain why something’s a great business, how and why it’s cheap, why it’s cheap for temporary reasons and how, on a normal basis, it should be trading at a much higher level. You’re never sitting there on the 40th page of your spreadsheet, as Buffett would say, agonizing over whether you should buy or not.

Joel Greenblatt, 10.31.06

好点子是很清楚的，那就是：你能解释为什么它是一个好的企业，怎样和为什么它又很便宜，正常来讲它应该以更高的价格交易，为什么它由于临时的原因而很便宜。巴菲特说过，你永远不用坐在那里，看着资产负债表第40页的EXCEL表格，痛苦地考虑卖还是买。

Another thing Peter Lynch did really well was figure out how else to make money on a good idea. Look down the industry structure and figure out the other ways that this particular information can generate an edge. In our portfolio today, we identify a theme – say consumer-driven health care – and then we try to figure out where all the opportunities are.

Jeffrey Ubben, 1.31.06

彼得·林奇很擅长的另一件事就是能了解到其它人如何用好点子盈利。自上而下来看行业结构，了解这个特殊的信息能制造优势的其它方式。在我们现在的组合里，我们确定一个主题，就是消费驱动的医疗保健，从而我们试着找到那些机会都在哪里。

Say you’re interested in copper. You may start with the mining companies, then move to refiners, then intermediate processors, then metal-bender manufacturers and on up the line. If one area of the business looks lousy, you may want to look at the companies that buy from those people. You may look at the competitors or the alternatives to copper. Thirty-five companies down the road, you’re likely to be in a completely different business and industry and you’ll come across something that looks interesting.

James Vanasek, 4.30.08

假如说你对铜有兴趣。你可能开始于采矿公司，然后是精炼厂，然后是铜加工企业，然后是合金制造厂以此类推。如果其中一个环节看起来没劲，你可能就想看一看从那些人手里买入的公司。你可能看看竞争者和铜的替代品。35个公司看下来你可能已经在完全不同的企业和行业里了，你可能会恰巧遇上看起来有趣的东西。

Our best ideas tend to come from what I call “old research, new events.” That’s typically the good company you’ve studied carefully and would love to own at the right price,that gets marked down after it trips or its industry goes out of favor.

Ricky Sandler, 8.25.06

我们最好的点子通常都产生于“旧的研究，新的事件”里。那些你仔细研究过的典型的好公司，你想找个合适的价格买入，那就等它偶尔一失足或行业不被看好时以低价买入。

It would be unusual for someone to call us with an idea that we don’t already have some knowledge of. As a result, the vast majority of our ideas come from thinking through the ramifications of industry developments or the recognition of changes within a market.

Lee Ainslie, 12.22.06

如果谁打给我们一个电话分享了一个我们还不曾有过的点子是比较罕见的。我们绝大多数主意源于对行业发展分支的考虑，以及公认的市场的变化。

The majority of our investments are originally driven from the top down. We’ll identify an industry that has underperformed for the past five or ten years that we believe is due for a cyclical regression up to the mean. Then we systematically review the micro-caps in the industry, sorting them based on financial measures and subjective assessments of management to identify the companies we’ll bore into.

David Nierenberg, 7.28.06

我们大多数的投资是自上而下的。我们先确定一个5或10年都表现不佳的行业，我们认为是由于经济景气周期造成衰退的行业。然后我们系统地了解那些行业中的小盘股，再用财务指标和估值进行分类，最终确定我们要买的公司。

Time is a precious resource and if you make it your task not to “miss” anything, you set yourself up for failure. There are too many opportunities out there and, by definition, you will miss many of them. That’s why we narrow where we want to look first by the themes we consider most compelling. We’re not necessarily seeing things others don’t see, but we will have a very different view on the magnitude of the trend or the speed at which it happens.

Oliver Kratz, 6.29.07

时间是无价的资源，如果你不想错过任何东西，最终会导致失败。机会是无穷无尽的，你肯定会错过它们中的很多。所以我们缩窄我们首先关注的，只考虑那些最引人注目的主题。我们无需去看那些其它人不关注的东西，但我们会对趋势的大小或者发生的速度持有不同观点。

I’d say most of the ideas that have made money for the portfolio have been the result of some form of reasoning by analogy. One example: Applying well-understood U.S. investment ideas to markets outside the U.S. During the time when onenewspaper towns in the U.S. were another version of Buffett's toll booth, there were a number of European newspapers that were dominant local monopolies which were still trading at attractive ultiples and I was able to do very well with them.

Guy Spier, 4.27.05

为组合赚钱的大多数的点子源于类比推理。例如，应用众所周知的美国投资理念于国外市场。当巴菲特投资报业这种收费桥的业务时，在欧洲报纸业也有很多这样的机会，只要价格具吸引力，我们就能抓住机会。

We use a lot of grapevine ideas, asking people what they’ve finished buying that might be interesting. Why not look at what other great investors have found?

Bruce Berkowitz, 4.28.06

我们用很多葡萄藤办法，问问别人都买了什么可能有趣的东西。为什么不参考其它伟大投资者发现的机会呢？

We learn a lot from other investors. I go to idea dinners and regularly talk to a lot of people I respect in the business. I’m not afraid of ideas owned by other people, but you obviously need to do your own work and make sure they fit what you do.

Ricky Sandler, 8.25.06

我们从其它投资者那里学到很多。我会去参加点子晚餐，并且定期地与很多我尊重的人聊天。我不害怕其它人已有的主意，但是你需要做你自己的功课来确定这些是不是适合你。

Our best source of ideas is probably other investors we highly respect. I don’t have a problem sharing ideas and research – we get as much as we give and we obviously only buy things that make sense for us after doing a lot of work.

Robert Lietzow, 2.29.08

我们最好的主意可能来源于我们非常尊重的其它投资者。我们不担心分享我们的主意和研究结果，我们得到的会与我们付出的一样多，但是我们只买入那些经过研究对我们有意义的东西。

I don’t talk much to other fund managers, but I do have a network of investigative reporters I know who call me from time to time to discuss long or short ideas they’ve come across, which can be helpful.

Francois Parenteau, 7.31.08

我不和其它基金经理讨论太多，但我有一个我熟识的调研报告（人）网络，他们发现一些有用的东西后会不时打我电话探讨做多或做空。

We follow management teams we know are good. We talk to operators we respect about what other companies or businesses they think are doing interesting things. We might look at something because it’s a product we use.

Mario Gibelli, 6.30.06

我们跟踪我们认为不错的管理团队。我们会与其它投资专家讨论哪些他们认为有有趣事情的公司或业务。

Bloomberg lists on a monthly basis the highest-ranked and lowest-ranked stocks by sell-side analysts. I look at the lowest-ranked for buying opportunities and the highest-ranked for selling opportunities.

Jon Jacobson, 2.28.06

彭博有一个卖方分析师月度最高、最低股票排名榜单。我在最低排名里寻找买入机会，在最高排名里寻找卖出机会。

One fruitful screen over the years has been for what we call low-P/E outliers –companies with the lowest 1% of trailing P/Es in the market, but with debt that is still less than equity. That causes us to look at things most investors will not look at, which is a good thing.

John Dorfman, 10.31.08

多年来我们一个很有成效的筛选方法称为低P/E异常值，在市场中1%最低P/E（近十二个月）的公司，但债务小于净资产。这就会引起我们的关注而其它很多投资者不会关注，这就是一个好东西。

We don’t do traditional screens and are actually looking for situations in which the publicly available information that a computer can analyze is giving false signals. For example, we bought auto-insurer Progressive [PGR] in 1999 when their earnings looked bad because they were spending heavily on a direct-to-consumer strategy like Geico’s. A computer would see that as a negative earnings trend resulting in a too-high multiple, but it doesn’t know how to judge whether certain spending might generate big returns in the future.

Boykin Curry, 3.31.08

我们不做传统的筛选，我们寻找那种可获得公共信息，而电脑分析又提供错误信号的那种机会。例如，我们1999年买入PGR时，它的盈利情况很差，因为它象Geico一样在直销给消费者战略上投入很大。电脑认为盈利的趋势是向下的导致过高的倍数，但它不知道如何判断是否某些花销在未来可能产生大的回报。