As an old saying says, “you best teacher is your last mistake.” However what’s challenging for value investors is that it’s very difficult to realize you’ve made a mistake to start with. As you are always going against herds, you’ve already made “mistakes” in others’ eyes, meaning you are left alone to make the judgement. Plus, you have to re-convince yourself about your verdicts when the name keeps going down after your purchases, or if the names move higher you just cannot stop feeling good about yourself, either way it’s really hard to maintain an objective view on your own past decisions.

Market recently has seen some big failures on names backed by some legendary value investors. Although may not be able to learn the lesson as deeply as the investor themselves do, I found these are great case studies nonetheless.

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