One of the things that makes investing so interesting is that there is a tension between the abstract principles that value investors advocate compared to their actual ability to execute on the strategy.
Take something like this: Most people agree with the notion that they like to buy stocks on sale. As a general rule, though, absent 1973 or 2009 type of market conditions, the types of stocks that are on sale tend to have something going wrong with them at the time—as I’ve discussed with previously, companies like Brown-Forman, Hershey, and Colgate-Palmolive are swimming along, and that’s why their stocks aren’t on sale.
On the other hand, when people encounter companies with something going wrong—think IBM’s slow adjustments to the cloud, McDonald’s any time same-store sales stagnate for a bit, or Johnson & Johnson after experiencing significant product recalls in the late 2000s and early 2010s, many people prefer … Read the rest of this article!