At 79 years old, Warren Buffett is no spring chicken. The fact is, most people his age are looking to get money out of the market, rather than put money in it.

Yet Buffett is continuing his life's work -- undeterred by age -- in the same way he always has.

See, in helping privately held Mars buy Wrigley last year, Buffett made a deal with zeroliquidity in sight. That's precisely the opposite of virtually all investors in private companies (particularly venture capitalists), who demand a clear path to liquidity from the start.

But not Buffett
The Oracle of Omaha has long preached that the long term is the onlyview for an investment -- even if the investor is beyond retirement age. He's said before that his ideal holding period is "forever" -- and the Mars-Wrigley- Berkshire deal is yet another example of Buffett putting that theory into practice.

Yet most investors have not learned this lesson. Recent New York Stock Exchange data showedthat the average holding period for a stock is now less than one year.

What truly matters
Buffett's willingness to act when others won't, along with his patience and discipline, make him a better investor than you. Those aren't his only advantages, though. Not long ago, we wrote an article highlighting a few other reasons why Warren Buffettis a better investor than you.

It seemed like a truism to us -- the man has built one of history's great fortunes on the power of his investing acumen, after all -- but some readers took offense.

We got emails telling us that Buffett has tons of advantages over the common man, ranging from his enormous war chest of cash to his access to executives and/or privileged information. And while there aren't many people who could command the same sort of sweetheart deals on Goldman Sachs and General Electric , having lots of cash isn't necessarily the advantage many readers made it out to be.

For starters ...
Buffett's enormous cash position is actually an enormous disadvantagewhen it comes to earning superior stock market returns. It essentially prevents him from investing in anything other than liquid large caps.

Just glance at Berkshire Hathaway's 13-F filing with the SEC, and although you'd recently find tiny liquidation play Comdisco Holding , you'll predominantly find multibillion-dollar companies such as Becton, Dickinson (NYSE: BDX), Kraft (NYSE: KFT), Washington Post (NYSE: WPO), and USG (NYSE: USG).

While those are solid companies, their size illustrates how small a pond Buffett generally fishes in (Comdisco is a shocking exception). According to Capital IQ (a division of Standard & Poor's), while there are more than 33,000 companies trading on the world's exchanges, there are just 1,940 currently capitalized at $3 billion or greater. That means Buffett's cash position effectively locks him out of 95% of all public companies.

Furthermore, because Buffett has said he won't invest in technology stocks, he's out another 182 opportunities, including companies he reveres, such as Google (Nasdaq: GOOG).

This hurts
In all, Buffett is restricted to a universe of some 1,700 stocks -- which is far from ideal. In fact, he has said that he could earn 50% annual returns each and every yearif he had only $1 million to invest, because it would give him free rein in the market.

With just $1 million or less, for example, he could take advantage of cheap opportunities in the micro-cap sector ... such as $140 million Diamond Hill Investment Group (Nasdaq: DHIL).

But because Diamond Hill is so small, Buffett probably doesn't even know about it. Heck, because Diamond Hill is so small, youprobably didn't know about it, either.

Friends in high places
As for an informational advantage, yes, Buffett has connections. But when he bought a big stake in PetroChina , he admitted that the only research he'd done was to read its annual reports. In other words, he acted on the exact same information available to all of us, and PetroChina tripled during the time Berkshire owned it. Continued...