A piece in Saturday's New York Times ponders the question, "Is it better to learn about Warren Buffett's investing methods and apply them to your own stock-picking or just buy shares of Berkshire Hathaway (NYSE: BRK.A)?" Robert Hagstrom, one of the world's foremost investing experts and the author of a slew of awesome investment books, including The Warren Buffett Way, Latticework, and the Detective and the Investor, opined that, "If you want to take advantage of Warren Buffett, the most efficient, direct way is to own the stock. It has not been a bad thing to do, even over the last five years."

As Berkshire's portfolio has gained in size over the years, it has held up admirably well, given the difficulties of beating the market with such a huge portfolio. But its size still puts it at a huge disadvantage. Buffett has often said that he would be able to deliver much stronger results with a portfolio of just a few million dollars.

If you admire Buffett's philosophy and want to emulate him in your own investing, I think there is good reason to believe that you can do a lot better implementing his strategies on your own. In his days running the Buffett Partnership, which provided some of the best returns of his career, he often invested in tiny companies that were trading at a huge discount to what he believed to be their intrinsic value. He just can't invest in tiny stuff with such a large portfolio, and has been forced to buy stocks that are comparably cheap, rather than true deep value stocks that he would prefer.

Similarly, I think it's probably not a good idea to try to mimic his moves -- buying stocks that he takes positions in. His universe of potential investments is just so limited these days.

If you admire Buffett's strategies but aren't comfortable picking stocks on your own, try to find someone managing a smaller fund who adheres to Buffett's investment principles.

While Legg Mason Value Trust manager Bill Miller's famed 15-year streak of beating the market came to an end in 2006, investors will still want to read his latest letter to shareholders. A rough year aside, he is still one of the greatest investing minds of our time. While he is considered to be a value investor, he has gained notoriety for investing in stocks not normally seen as value stocks, including high P/E stocks like Google. Some of the highlights from his latest letter:

My colleague Michael Mauboussin applied some of Gould's analysis to investing in Chapter 6 of his book More Than You Know. What are the chances it was 100% luck? There are two broad ways to look at it, one involving a priori, and the other a posteriori, probabilities. If beating the market was purely random, like tossing a coin, then the odds of 15 consecutive years of beating it would be the same as the odds of tossing heads 15 times in a row: 1 in 215, or 1 in 32,768. Using the actual probabilities of beating the market in each of the years from 1991 to 2005 makes the number 1 in 2.3 million. So there was probably some skill involved. On the other hand, something with odds of 1 in 2.3 million happens to about 130 people per day in the US, so you never know.

The book he refers to, More Than You Know is one of the better, more original investing books to come along lately. Order it with a copy of Robert Hagstrom's book Latticework: The New Investing. Here's another gem that was in the letter that I will certainly be adding to my list of favorite quotes about investing:

As I often remind our analysts, 100% of the information you have about a company represents the past, and 100% of the value depends on the future.

And he offers a strong case for how and why investors can do better than the market:

The market does reflect the available information, as the professors tell us. But just as the funhouse mirrors don't always accurately reflect your weight, the markets don't always accurately reflect that information. Usually they are too pessimistic when it is bad, and too optimistic when it is good.

Bill Miller's letters to shareholders contain some of the best insight into investing that can be found at any price. Use Google to find copies of his old ones, and be sure to read the new ones as they come out.