Academics have for decades touted the belief that no one stock picker can consistently beat the entire stock market. The market is efficient, they say - it always prices assets at their intrinsic value. And it reacts almost instantaneously to new information, which reduces an investor's chances of getting into a stock before its price reflects new information.

And although this theory (formally known as the Efficient Markets Hypothesis) is scorned and doubted by many thousands of investors, a little thought on the matter might actually cast some doubt on this scorn: The stock market is one of the most watched, analyzed and quantified entities around. Countless millions of man hours are poured into the analysis of the market each day, with most stocks being dissected and scrutinized with a myriad of methodologies. To say you can beat the market is equivalent to saying that your analysis is more accurate and more timely than the sum total of analysis of the entire stock market.

That's no small statement.

When considered in this light, it becomes much more reasonable to think there might be some validity to the idea that no one can beat the market consistently year after year. And many might think that the people who are able to beat the market must be armed with the most accurate, deep and extremely detailed information which gives them the edge they need to beat the masses of people all analyzing and reanalyzing the same stocks.

But what's interesting about Warren Buffet is that he is not only able to beat the market by a wide margin year after year, but his techniques and analysis do not involve the fancy information that is used by the vast majority of the rest of Wall Street. In fact, at the core of Warren Buffet's investment philosophy are just a few simple, easy to understand but extremely important ideas. At first, these core ideas seem like little more than common sense - as simple and strait forward as you can imagine. But taken together, and executed with rigor, the extraordinary power of these core ideas becomes immediately clear. Read on to understand this philosophy for yourself.

Own the Business

One of the key tenets of Buffet's investment philosophy is the idea that when you buy shares of stock in a company, you should put as much thought and effort into the purchase as you would if you were buying the whole company. The results of this line of thought are very important, and very practical.

If you were going to buy

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