Thomas Gayner graduated from the University of Virginia in 1983 and started his career in accounting and began working at PriceWaterhouseCoopers as a Certified Public Accountant. Gayner soon became enthralled by the world of finance and active trading and decided to switch careers and took up a job as a stock broker at a small company known as Davenport and Company of Virginia. At this particular job, Gayner gained considerable exposure to research techniques and industry practices since the major part of his job was to identify value within smaller regional companies that had the potential to grow into bigger businesses during the long term.Gayner’s success is defined by his investment strategy or his technique of value investing. By definition, value investing focuses on the intrinsic or fair value of stocks and compares them to their market price. The fair value of securities is basically the present value of its expected future cash flows. The cash flows for a bond for example are the coupons and principal redemption at maturity.For a stock, the present value of its expected future dividends constitutes its fair value. If this intrinsic value is higher than the market price, the security is termed to be undervalued and thus attractive for investors. Securities that are actively traded such as those of blue chip companies are highly unlikely to be available at a discount and thus are not usually included in value-oriented investment portfolios.