Where the method came from

Value investing is not a discovery. It is a written tradition, about ninety years old, with named authors, dated books, arguments that were answered, and claims that have been tested since.

This course is that record. It starts with the market Graham and Dodd were writing about, which had almost no audited statements and no federal disclosure system. It ends with the state of the evidence today, honestly sorted into what has held up, what is contested, and what nobody has settled.

Two things run through it. The first is that every generation in this line moved the same question one step: Graham asked what the assets are worth, Buffett asked what the business earns on them, Greenwald asked what a competitor would have to spend to take the business away. The second is that the tradition has a serious opponent, and the opponent is stated here at full strength rather than dismissed.

Nothing in this course is a rule to apply. The rules live in the courses on either side of it. What you get here is the reason those rules exist, who wrote them down, and what happened when somebody measured them.

You need value-investing first, and reading-financial-statements helps, because the last lesson places a printed 1973 threshold in the market this product measures today.

What you will be able to do

Say what Graham and Dodd argued and under what conditions. Name the criteria Graham printed and the ones people attribute to him that he never wrote. State the efficient-market objection the way its authors state it. Describe what behavioural finance answered and what it left open. And say, without overclaiming in either direction, where the tradition actually stands.