Sublime

For the unprepared, meeting John Neff can be a "disaster." Those who meet Neff's standards appreciate thatJohn answers his own phone ("Neff!"), and he always gives as good as he gets, or better, in both information and insight. Neff's rigorous discipline in "doing his homework" has one important consequence: His portfo

Then, as now, I assigned great weight to a judgment about the durability of earnings power under adverse circumstances.

Contrarian that I am, the format for this book is intentionally unorthodox as books on investing go these days. It is not about I lail Mary passes; it's about grinding out gains quarter after quarter, year after year. My kind of investing rests on three elements: character, goals, and experience.

We never salivated for the last dollar in a major move (i.e., the oil stocks). Instead, we tried to take stocks from undervalued to fairly valued. We left "greater-fool" investing to others.

Windsor was not fancy. As in tennis, I tried to keep the ball in play and let my adversaries make mistakes. I picked stocks with low p/e multiples primed to be upgraded in the market if they were deserving, and endeavored to keep losers at break-even levels. Usually, I returned home with more assets in the Windsor Fund than the day before. And I sl

Any service that systematically updates stocks can help. I'd go through new editions of Value Line every week. I don't read, much less follow, the valuations or predictions. I studied the numbers.

as the market grew more excited, we grew more cautious.

Low p/e companies growing faster than 7 percent a year tipped us off to underappreciated signs of life, particularly if accompanied by an attention-getting dividend.