shrewdm.com - Schloss deep value

I imagine most of you know of Mr. Walter J. Schloss. If not a casual web search will show that he was another student of Graham, who was successful - very successful - using his own implementation of value investing.

I tried to secure his self-published biography probably 20-25 years ago but copies were going for about $2k and I passed, though this was clearly a very positive indictment of his regard in the value investing caste.

The linked piece mentions that there are no longer any Grahmian net-nets, and that's likely true. There are opportunities, though. The biggest back up the truck moment in my investing arc (ok, well I still invest as a retiree but as I stepped away from work there aren't many new dollars and it is more discarding here or there, and sometimes adding a new ticker) in raw dollars was 16 March 2020. The cruise industry was being pummeled, as was much of the hospitality/hotel/restaurant/tourism overall, due to the pandemic.

No net-net, but on that day I did some calculations and realized that the fleet of the ships held by Royal Caribbean, Norwegian, Carnival, and such even at fire sale prices was considerably higher than the very depressed market cap of these companies. All of them took about a 90% haircut from say, November 2019. Were people never going to cruise again? Maybe, but if the pandemic got that much worse for that long we had bigger problems and I probably wouldn't be worried about some tickers. So we backed the truck up, sold a bit over a year later at what for me was an eye popping gain in a short timeline (usually I like "forever" too but this was a bit of a different play) and life was good. Though if I held it would have been better.

There's still value plays. One just has to be patient, and keep some dry powder.