As we’ve seen the world get shaken up over the past few months, it’s pretty likely that my internal biases are impacting my assessments of companies — I always intend to be rigorous in setting “buy below” prices for myself, which I hope will be useful for you, but it’s very likely that my rosier outlook on the world in January would have pushed me to be a little more generous in setting “buy” prices than I’m likely to be today, with war raging in Europe and global geopolitical risk on everyone’s mind at the same time that inflation is becoming more persistent in the US.

I can’t really quantify that bias, but I’m sure it’s there — I tend to hold out for “value” prices for lower-growth stocks, and probably have grown more willing to overpay for “growth” stocks in recent years, given the reset that growth stocks had from 2019-2021. So in response to some reader questions, I’ve added a new column to the Real Money Portfolio spreadsheet that tells when I last updated my valuation thinking for each company and set those “buy below” prices, with that date linking to that particular article so you can see my specific reasoning for setting that price level. I hope that helps — I’ll certainly be wrong sometimes, but I can at least explain my reasoning so you can decide when you want to disagree with me.

These are surely the times that test conviction — the collapse of “growth” stocks over the past few months doesn’t mean that investing for the future is dead, great companies will continue to emerge, new technologies will be developed that change the world, and there will be growth somewhere… but it does mean that we are being smacked in the face with an opportunity to really distinguish between the stock tickers that were kind of fun to ride with as they went bonkers, and the companies that you are pretty sure will be long-term winners as they build dominant franchises and continue growing into the future.

We were all growth investors last year, and perhaps we’ll all end up being value investors this year… but now’s the time to be honest with ourselves: A growth stock that falls does not automatically become a value stock, and fallen growth darlings, particularly those with weak or faltering margins (or no profits ...