Q — Should we be concerned that you have a small investment team? How can you cover hundreds of stocks? Won’t you miss things?

A — No, we don’t need to and of course. We run a concentrated portfolio that strives for low turnover. Classic behavioral finance and my personal practical experience suggest that the amount of intensely motivated and bright people in a room is highly correlated to the amount of turnover in a portfolio. If we ran a 150 stock portfolio that was equal weighted to a benchmark and our world was about beating a sector by 100 basis points, having 20 people spread widely would be a natural structure. That’s not us and the history of performance measurement suggests an inverse relationship between size and bodies in motion, and performance. Good results are much more about consciously missing potential mistakes and being mostly right about decisions you do make, rather than swiveling your neck into a frenzy at what may or may not be happening next door.

It is absolutely correct that we do not possess all the information in the world nor do we want to. Over time, every investor accumulates spheres of competence in certain industries and companies, as well as networks of people and management teams. There is no directive from investment industry divinity that suggests that one has to make money from new ideas all the time and in fact, I am somewhat partial to the opposite—mining deep trenches of prior knowledge and action—and taking advantage of newcomers decisions.

I also think people grossly underestimate the impact of technology in the investment management industry versus even five years ago, much less ten and twenty. We use CapitalIQ, Bloomberg and the Applied Finance Group databases to screen through thousands of stocks globally and assemble them into fishing pools of value or business characteristics, and it’s automatically in our inbox every Friday morning. We can download fundamental data into our “proprietary” analytical spreadsheet and have a pretty good 30,000 foot view of business characteristics and value of a target and its competitors in a few minutes. Years of corporate SEC data, presentations and earnings transcripts can be stocked on an iPad in another few minutes to enable a deeper dive to 5,000 feet. The ingenious Flipboard app can enable quick grazing on information exotica plucked from things like aggregateresearch.com or the China Securities Journal.

This all suggests that the real answer to the question posed is that we are more worried about how to ignore more of what goes on around us than we are worried about missing something. As Herbert Simon noted, “A wealth of information creates a paucity of attention.”