[nikhizzle]

Perhaps, one thing I've noticed spending time around professional investors is that the best long term ones I come into contact with spend most of their time exploring first hand knowledge, whether this is via conversations or reading the public documents a company publishes.

I think they very rarely rely on secondary sources, which is very similar to his approach in finding the treasure. A few examples:

- An investor who is considered one of the best technology public equity investors in history. He and his team focus on the quarterly conference calls and spend a very intensive amount of time focussing on what the executives say.

- An investor who gotten about 100x return on his mid-stage tech investments over the last 3 years. He spends his time in conversation with contacts who have first hand knowledge of the economy and growing businesses.

- An investor who was a former parter at Goldman Sachs, and retired early to invest in public equities. He spends all day looking at the balance sheets of companies.

[nl]

This is actually a pretty fair point I hadn't considered.