Legg Mason fund manager Bill Miller tells a wonderful story of a visit he made early in his career to an institutional money manager in Boston, to whom he was pitching the shares of R.J. Reynolds, then trading at four times earnings.

As Miller says: “When I finished, the chief investment officer said: ‘That’s a really compelling case but we can’t own that. You didn’t tell me why it’s going to outperform the market in the next nine months.’ I said I didn’t know if it was going to do that or not but that there was a very high probability it would do well over the next three to five years.