I always knew I was going to be rich. I don't think I doubted it for a minute.

In Buffett's own words:

"I always knew I was going to be rich.  I don't think I doubted it for a minute.  There was Western Insurance earning $16 a shae, and selling at $16.  There was National Insurance selling at one time's earnings.  How could it miss?"

Buffett worked from published information available to everyone by subscribing to all the financial and business journals and by writing to companies for their annual reports.  He kept away from Wall Street on purpose so as not to be influenced by the crowd's market talks.  He did his research work diligently and thought deeply about his investment.  His purchases were never made in haste and were all based on the sound principle of high intrinsic value.  Throughout the 1960s, when Wall Street was going mad over conglomerates and high technology stocks, Buffett stuck to smaller companies untouched by headlines and excitement.  Of course, before the use of computers became widespread in the 1960's, it was relatively easy to pick undervalued stocks. 

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This chap emulated Warren Buffett.  He has done well.

http://www.dnaindia.com/money/interview_we-will-never-see-another-warren-buffett_1301088

'We will never see another Warren Buffett'

How did you get into investing business from information technology?


Around 1994 I heard about Warren Buffett for the first time accidentally. The first couple of biographies about him had just been published a year or two before that. I read those books and I was quite blown away by some data points that were coming out about him and the industry and so on. I didn't have any experience or even education in the investment business. But I was very intrigued by it.

I started to invest in the public equity markets using Buffett's model in 1994 and basically did extremely well, north of 70% a year, till about 1999. I was getting more and more interested in investment research and securities analysis and made a decision to leave my company. I brought in an outside CEO and decided that I would spend more time on investing and at the same time some friends of mine wanted me to manage their money for them. It started as a hobby in 1999 with about a million dollars from eight people. About a year later the business (TransTech) actually got sold, I wasn't running it anyway, but I was completely cashed out. And then I thought that let's make my hobby a real business, try to scale it up and get investors. We now manage about $500 million -- ten years later.