Business Principles

Excellence in investing

By this we mean sticking to a value discipline geared towards providing attractive long term results and the willingness to invest in securities or industries that are out of favor or misunderstood. We don’t follow the crowd and don’t mind being different. Or goal is to compound capital for eventual net worth as opposed to managing to short term benchmark comparisons. Investment succeess requires discipline, patience, a healthy dose of skepticism and the willingness to lag the market in the short run as a means to investing in securities that can outperform over longer term measurement periods.  We fully understand that managing other people's money is a heavy responsibility and appreciate from our own experience how difficult it is to accumulate and preserve wealth.

Research

Adding value requires a knowledge advantage than can come only from years of experience and a continual focus on reading and learning. Our research is a simple approach centered on basic valuation vs. price analysis which we beilieve are important elements required to identify companies that can deliver attractive long term investment returns.

Alignment of Interests (our money along side yours)

We put clients’ interests ahead of our own and treat all clients equally.  We pay strict attention to potential conflicts of interests always avoiding them when possible and dealing fairly with them if not.  We operate under the theory if all of our day to day practices and business behaviors became known there would be no grounds for complaint. We believe it is important to treat clients as we would want to be treated if our roles were reversed.   We are a significant investor in the Fund and substantially all of our investment activities in marketable securities conducted outside the Fund are positioned similar to that of the Fund.

Communication with Clients

We want to communicate with clients in order to meet their individual needs and strengthen our relationship with them. Our goal is for every investor to have a complete understanding of our operating philosophy and approach to managing investment capital. We report performance monthly and show our results compared to typical relevant market averages. In our reporting to clients, we accurately state our achievements and believe it is just as important to explain our mistakes as our successes.

Management fee arrangements

We believe our management fee arrangement should compensate us fairly for the work we do and the value we add for our clients as a means to a constructive business relationship. Fee arrangements should be structured in a way that motivates us to act entirely in our client’s best interests and they should be fair, competitive and explicit. All client investment amounts of comparable size pay comparable fees for the same service.