The Week’s Top Stories at Value Investing News

Jan. 31 (Bloomberg) — It was the $109,000 photocopying bill that hedge fund manager William Ackman says made him realize how much he’d read and underlined before betting against bond insurer MBIA Inc. in 2002.

Sears got more than its share of online holiday traffic this year, to place emphasis here make perfect sense.

Has the Fed staunched the bleeding of the wounded financial markets with its historic three-quarters of a percent interest rate cut? And how should individual investors react to the falling markets this month?

At 91, the man Warren Buffett famously dubbed a “superinvestor” is still picking unloved stocks. Walter Schloss has lived through 17 recessions, starting with one when Woodrow Wilson was President. This old-school value investor has made money through many of them. What’s ahead for the economy? He doesn’t worry about it.

Robert Cialdini’s old article – The Science and Practice of Persuasion.

Excerpt: “In this webcast, Robert A. Olstein discusses the following:

* Valuation and inferential financial statement analysis

* Free cash flow

* Quality of earnings”

Shlomi Cohen claims that Warren Buffett is the only person who predicted what is happening on the markets at present. The current upheaval was not sparked by economic processes, such as the US real estate crisis, which is neither that country’s first crisis nor its last, although everyone finds it a very convenient peg to hang all the current troubles on.

Have you ever wondered what separates David Dreman, Warren Buffett, Charlie Munger,etc.from the rest of the world? The answer is simple but the force behind it can make the difference between a great investor and an average investor. I am talking about investor psychology, also known as Behavior Finance.

Bottom-up manager Dodge & Cox’s domestic equity and fixed-income performance slumped at the end of 2007, but don’t be quick to point a finger at the credit crunch.

“Better early than never,” I always say. And since never is a long, long, time – being late is OK too, but early – yeah early – is a portfolio manager’s best maxim. In this case it has nothing to do with birds getting the worm or being the first runner out of the starting blocks, but more about being positioned when markets move into crisis mode.

Eight years after he shut down his famed Tiger fund, the veteran ‘retired’ manager is racking up the biggest wins of his life. Fortune gets an exclusive peek at the Wall Street legend’s portfolio.

David Dreman, the 71-year-old value investor, said he bought more shares of financial institutions after the industry’s worst annual performance since 1990 created a “major opportunity.”

Munger told a story of composing great Wolfgang Mozart. It goes something like this: A young man, around 25 years old, goes to Mozart and asks him for advice on writing symphonies. Mozart suggests to him that he is too young to write symphonies. The young man gets confused and reminds Mozart that Mozart himself had been writing symphonies since he was 10 years old.