"What if there were a nationwide competition in coin flipping, 225 million flippers total, each flipping once per morning, and we found a select few [say, 215 people] who'd flipped 20 straight winning flips [flips where the result was guessed correctly] on 20 mornings?"

Buffet then continued,

"Some business school professor will probably be rude enough to bring up the fact that if 225 million orangutans had engaged in a similar exercise, the results would be much the same --- 215 egotistical orangutans with 20 straight flips."

"There are some important differences in the examples [of value investors] I am going to present", he continues...

"For one thing,

if a) you had taken 225 million orangutans distributed roughly as the U.S. population is;

if b) 215 winners were left after 20 days;

and if c) you found that 40 came from a particular zoo in Omaha, you would be pretty sure you were on to something."

"So you would probably go out and ask the zookeeper about what he's feeding them, whether they had special exercises, what book they read, and who knows what else."

"That is, if you found any really extraordinary concentrations of success, you might want to see if you could identify concentrations of unusual characteristics that might be causal factors."