Think independently

You can't be a good value investor without being an independent thinker.

- Joel Greenblatt

Simple!

Figure out what something is worth and pay a lot less.

- Joel Greenblatt

Patience needed for this to work

Traditional value investing strategies have worked for years and everyone's known about them. They continue to work because it's hard for people to do, for two main reasons. First, the companies that show up on the screens can be scary and not doing so well, so people find them difficult to buy. Second, there can be one-, two- or three-year periods when a strategy like this doesn't work. Most people aren't capable of sticking it out through that.

- Joel Greenblatt

Clarity comes with ideas

There's a clarity that comes with great ideas: You can explain why something's a great business, how and why it's cheap, why it's cheap for temporary reasons and how, on a normal basis, it should be trading at a much higher level. You're never sitting there on the 40th page of your spreadsheet, as Buffett would say, agonizing over whether you should buy or not.

- Joel Greenblatt