OID: The proverbial good old days.
    Nygren: That type of investor barely exists anymore. Whether you're talking about the individual investor or the investment adviser, the focus has continued to get shorter and shorter and shorter.
    I've been running Oakmark Select Fund for four years now. And we were very fortunate to get off to a fast start. The Fund was up quite a bit its first couple of months and then 50-something percent the next year. But what amazed me was that there were people actually redeeming. I couldn't help but wonder, "What were they hoping for?"

OID: Are you suggesting 60% per year is unrealistic?
    Nygren: One of the things we do a little differently from most of the other fund companies is that we make our managers accessible via e-mail. And it never fails - if we go through a three or four-week bad period, the e-mails start coming along the lines of, "What's wrong? I bought into this because I believed in you."
    And maybe they didn't read much of what we said - because I believe that our fund family, more than most, has gone out of its way to say, "You really shouldn't invest in any fund unless your time horizon is at least 3-5 years, if not longer."

OID: That would apply to anyone investing in equities in general, wouldn't it?
    Nygren: Absolutely. But in the mutual fund industry, that's way out there. In today's world, investors with a 3-5 month time horizon think they have a long time horizon.

OID: I guess everything's relative.
    Nygren: That's right. An acquaintance of mine was all shaken up by recent declines in the stock market. And I told her, "Relax. As long as you don't own high profile technology names, stocks are not historically expensive. Just stand pat and things will be fine."
    Well, the next day, I spoke with her. The market was down 2% that day. And she said, "You lied to me."

OID: You don't think her time horizon is long enough?
    Nygren: The word "investor" - at least the definition that most of us grew up with - doesn't represent many of the people who buy and own stocks today. We're all faced with that frustrating position that at the time our universe is the most attractive, it's probably also the time the fewest number of clients want you to buy those stocks and clients are firing you left and right.

OID: Which has to be one of the greatest indications in the world that you're on the right track.
    Nygren: You bet. As I said at the Morningstar Conference, we've received more complaints from shareholders about the fact that we own Toys "R" Us than anything else we've ever owned. We've heard things like, "If you're so stupid as to buy Toys 'R' Us, we know that we're in the wrong fund."
    But that just makes me more confident about an idea. The criticism's left me feeling very positive about it.