Is value investing dead?
In one paragraph
No — but the easy version of it (buy low P/E, wait, collect) stopped working reliably around 2007, and the harder version (deep analysis of durable competitive advantage) still works but requires skills most retail investors lack.
What this actually means
Value investing has been "dead" approximately a dozen times since Benjamin Graham codified it in the 1930s. Each pronouncement has eventually looked premature. The 2010s growth-stock dominance, when cheap-looking stocks badly underperformed the S&P 500 for a decade, produced the loudest obituaries. Then came 2022, when value staged one of its sharpest comebacks on record.
The more honest framing is that simple factor-based value investing — the kind you can implement with a screen for low price-to-book or P/E ratios — has seen its edge eroded by crowding and by structural changes in how modern businesses create value. Intangible assets (software, brand, network effects) don't show up cleanly on balance sheets, which means classic Graham screens systematically undervalue asset-light companies and overvalue capital-heavy ones.
What hasn't died is the underlying logic: paying less than something is worth is better than paying more. The challenge is that accurately estimating what something is worth has gotten harder, not easier. Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger evolved Graham's framework by focusing on the quality of the business, not just the cheapness of the price — buy wonderful companies at fair prices rather than fair companies at wonderful prices.
For individual investors, this debate has a practical resolution. Books like The Intelligent Investor and Common Stocks and Uncommon Profits remain worth reading for the mental models they build. But most retail investors are better served by low-cost index funds, which automatically own the full market at minimal cost, than by trying to out-analyze professionals with decades of experience and better data.
Value investing as a philosophy is alive. Value investing as a formulaic screen is genuinely harder than it used to be.
