Of course that’s your contention. You’re a first-year deep value investor.
You just finished The Intelligent Investor, think net-nets are a cheat code, and you’re tweeting P/B ratios like they’re scripture.
Right now, it’s all about Ben Graham, "margin of safety," "cigar butts," you even printed out a checklist.
Next month, you’ll discover Klarman and start saying things like “risk is not volatility” in casual conversation.
By fall, you’ll hit Greenblatt, run a Magic Formula screen, and convince yourself you’ve reverse-engineered Buffett’s brain.
Next year, you’ll be at an obscure value conference in Omaha, pitching a furniture liquidation business with asbestos liabilities and calling it “unloved but cash rich.”
You’ll use terms like “mispriced optionality” to describe a company that hasn’t turned a profit since 1998.
You haven’t even begun to suffer yet.
You haven’t held a 0.4x book stock that got delisted to the Expert Market and now trades by appointment only.
You haven’t emailed IR five times with no response and still doubled your position out of spite.
You haven’t stared at a balance sheet so long you start dreaming in GAAP.
You think this is about numbers.
It’s not.
It’s about pain tolerance.
Come back when you’ve held garbage for five years, been diluted twice, and still called it a win.
Then we’ll talk deep value.