Value investors manage their portfolios based on the following ideas:

  • calculating “intrinsic value” based on fundamental analysis
  • buying stocks that are considered cheap compared to their intrinsic value - a “margin of safety”

The value investor philosophy is based on the assumption that a stock can be severely mispriced relative to its intrinsic value because of recent economic, political or other events but in the long run its price will match the company’s value as a business.

Now, there are these things called 13F filings - documents that large institutional investment managers are required to submit for the SEC detailing ther most significant positions.

The downside of the 13F filings is that they are published for each quarter with a 45-day delay so the information in them are a few months old when they are made public. However, the portfolios of long term value investors should include stocks with long term potential so a few months of delay should not mean much with regards to the long-term value they assigned to them. I had the idea to check the recent changes in value investor portfolios and check their worst performing stocks because if they really did their homework (which I assume they did) and they bought stocks with a “margin of safety” (also assumed) and the stocks are even cheaper now than when they bought them then those stocks should be a strong buy.

So let’s do the following:

  • take a look at the 13F filings of the most famous value investors at WhaleWisdom
  • find stocks in their portfolios that went down since they bought them
  • check trends - whether they have been increasing or decreasing their holdings
  • buy some stocks

I took a look at the public porfolios of

  • Howard Marks (Oaktree Capital)
  • Phil Town (Rule One Fund)
  • Warren Buffett (Berkshire Hathaway)
  • Joel Greenblatt (Gotham Asset Management)
  • Michael Burry (Scion Capital)
  • Seth Klarman (Baupost Group)
  • Monish Pabrai (Dalal Street)

I was looking for stocks where the long term trend (last 10-20-30 years if possible) was clearly positive but the current price is quite depressed.

Bought the following stocks:

  • FMC
  • Constellation Brands
  • Lululemon
  • Charter Communications
  • Magnachip
  • Sprouts Farmers Market
  • Liberty Broadband
  • Organon
  • Gentex
  • Wendy’s
  • Flowers Foods
  • Conagra
  • Kosmos Energy
  • Huntsman
  • Brown-Forman

Edit (2026.01): Since the original post, I also bought the following:

  • Novo Nordisk
  • Roper technologies
  • Target
  • Hormel
  • Pernod Ricard
  • UnitedHealth
  • Baxter
  • Becton Dickinson
  • Gartner

The price charts of most have a common theme: decades of steady growth (on a log scale!) with a significant drop recently. They are trading at fairly low P/E and and some at extremely low P/B (below 1). I imageine this is what value stocks should look like on a price chart.

I did this with a relatively small portion of my portfolio and after months of keeping money off the stock market being afraid of high valuations but also feeling some FOMO while waiting for a dip. I didn’t do much research on these companies, just looked at a bunch of numbers like P/E, P/B, revenue, income growth and most importantly the price charts and the prices of the stocks relative to the price the mentioned investors paid for them.

I should point out that this is an “experiment” in the sense that I’m trying to test my ability to take more risks (as opposed to just buying and holding lower risk funds), to handle potential swings and to be somewhat exposed to the world of finance and economics. To see what I can learn. I obviously want this to succeed and produce good returns but this is not an “experiment” in the sense that I would evaluate it based on outcome in a number of years - this is of critical importance. Our decisions about uncertain future events must not be judged by their outcome. They should be judged by how much effort we spent processing and evaluation the available information at the time.

I believe my reasoning for buying these stocks makes sense and that I made a reasonable decision, but I also feel like I’m trying to justify it even more after making this move and I’m making some important realisations as I’m writing this. On one hand I feel like I have too much faith in my - admittedly quite rudimentary - idea but on the other hand I feel like I was thinking for long enough about what to do with my money and I weighed the possibilities.

The main reasons I chose these particular stocks:

  • the glamourous tech stocks that produced huge returns recently seem way overvalued
  • the popular stock indexes are heavily concentrated in tech stocks
  • value investing (especially the notion of buying very cheap stocks) seems to be a reasonable idea
  • small cap value stocks outperform large cap growth stocks over long time horizons according to academia
  • consumer essentials did well during market corrections which seem more and more likely
  • healthcare and consumer essentials stocks generally seem undervalued

This little group of stocks is like a poor man’s “super-cheap-mostly-consumer-essentials-and-healthcare-no-ai” index. But then why wouldn’t I just pick an ETF along these lines? Well, I didn’t really find one but I didn’t look that long. My little individual stock portfolio is likely too small of a sample (25 stocks as of jan. 2026) to draw meaningful conclusions from my results even years from now. Or maybe it isn’t. Will I be able to say “hey, good job” or “oh you dumbass” after x years based on results? I don’t know and that means I really should study statistics.

I’m doing this in large part to learn and to force myself to think. To think about how and why I make decisions. As a continuation, I’d like to learn about the basics of quantitative analysis and implement something that can automatically recognize the stock price pattern that I was looking for in these purchases. Also, I’d like to incorporate different types of fundamental data in the evaluation. I need to start gathering real data and learn about ways of analyzing it.