On Seeking Professional Help - By Dan Ferris

There’s much documentation to show that most investors – individual and professional alike – fail to adequately appreciate how difficult, and therefore rare, is the production of outsized investment returns. I don’t want to suggest that you’re crazy to pursue such a goal, but I think most of us – again, individual and professional alike – ought to have no qualms about seeking, as it were, “professional help.”

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Seeking professional help means that, when the public equity markets offer you easy access to a great capital allocator, you should exploit the opportunity. The names I’m talking about include the folks in Omaha, Loews, Sears Holdings, Leucadia National, Markel, Fairfax Financial Holdings and the one I own, for which I shall advocate forthwith, Alleghany Corporation (NYSE: Y).