The best business returns are usually achieved by companies that are doing something quite similar today to what they were doing five or ten years ago.
Investors making purchases in an overheated market need to recognize that it may often take an extended period for the value of even an outstanding company to catch up with the price they paid.
An investor should ordinarily hold a small piece of an outstanding business with the same tenacity that an owner would exhibit if he owned all of that business.
If you expect to continue to purchase stocks throughout your life, you should welcome price declines as a way to add stocks more cheaply to your portfolio.
We're coming off a quarter here that was in-line with our expectations, but much lower at WPZ due to Geismar's extended outage and a continued heavy capital investing period all as was expected.
The key to investing is not assessing how much an industry is going to affect society, or how much it will grow, but rather determining the competitive advantage of any given company and, above all, the durability of that advantage.