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My best investments usually involve an opinion about a company that the rest of the world doesn't share or adamantly disbelieves or doesn't focus on.

focus on inventory control and return on capital.

And that wasn't psychologically congenial to me either, because I have no discipline. I just sort of wander around the overall in search of things.

I had read a bunch of stuff on investing ever since I had gotten interested: Supermoney, about Ben Graham and Warren Buffett; Graham's Intelligent Investor; Security Analysis; David Dreman's Psychology in the Stock Market. Combine those books and those approaches, and what you have is basically a contrarian, value-based methodology, which, psychologically, was very compatible with the way I tended to think about things. I tend to think stocks are more attractive at lower prices rather than higher prices.

What is the return on marginal capital for InterActive's group of businesses

China is a huge secular story. By that I mean the long-term direction of the market is clear, even though in the short term there may be setbacks. It's cyclically extended, it looks like. And just as you pointed out, there's so much written about it that, I think, this has probably led to some overextension of investment into areas that probably don't warrant it. The Chinese economy is about the same size as the Italian economy. People don't get too worried about what Italy's doing. Of course, China's got a faster growth rate. And the combination of China, India, Russia, Brazil, Eastern Europe, Southeast Asian economies, that total complex of economies, together, is gonna be the source of most of the world's growth.

At some point, will there be a secular peak in oil production? Absolutely. Is it going to be in the next couple of years? I don't know.

buying low-expectation stocks, buying higher-dividend-yielding stocks, staying away from things with high expense ratios, and most important, the key thing would be — as Warren Buffett says — you need to be fearful when others are greedy, and greedy when others are fearful. So when the market's been down for a while, and it looks bad, then you should be more aggressive, and when it's been up for a while, then you should be less aggressive. And I think also, most importantly, people need to think long term. People tend to react and not anticipate. And what they react to is what they wish they'd done a year ago, or two years ago.

And the last thing I'll say is that the whole growth/value distinction has become rigidified. Most value people tend to own stocks that are cyclically underpriced. Most growth people own stocks that are secularly underpriced: #2things that can grow for long periods of time. > Our portfolios historically tended to be, though I wouldn't say they are now, better diversified along both cyclical and secular lines. And our portfolio tries to look at underpricing or mispricing along both of those dimensions so that we're not caught in one or the other.

things that can grow for long periods of time.

had read a bunch of stuff on investing ever since I had gotten interested: Supermoney, about Ben Graham and Warren Buffett; Graham's Intelligent Investor; Security Analysis; David Dreman's Psychology in the Stock Market. Combine those books and those approaches, and what you have is basically a contrarian, value-based methodology, which, psychologically, was very compatible with the way I tended to think about things. I tend to think stocks are more attractive at lower prices rather than higher prices.

And that wasn't psychologically congenial to me either, because I have no discipline. I just sort of wander around the overall in search of things.

The key thing would be — as Warren Buffett says — you need to be fearful when others are greedy, and greedy when others are fearful. So when the market's been down for a while, and it looks bad, then you should be more aggressive, and when it's been up for a while, then you should be less aggressive."

"Well, if you do what other people do, you get the results that other people get.So by diversifying your sources of information, you get insights, analogies and metaphors, and you see connections that other people might not see."

A book by Katrina Firlik called Another Day in the Frontal Lobe: A Brain Surgeon Exposes Life on the Inside. It's basically an inside look at what it's like to be a neurosurgeon and a little bit about the brain. Upcoming books are The Halo Effect, by Phil Rosenzweig, and The Difference, by University of Michigan professor Scott Page. It's about diversity theory.