Though to Joel Greenblatt, it's all the same.
For four decades, the managing principal and co-chief investment officer of Gotham Asset Management has stuck to the same style of value investing as practiced by Warren Buffett and Benjamin Graham.
That has awarded him an impeccable track record in which from 1985 to 1994, when Greenblatt was still managing Gotham Capital — the predecessor of Gotham Asset Management — he averaged returns of 50% a year before fees.
But today the market, after having gone through a once-in-a-century pandemic that shut down economic activities around the world, is getting a little weird. The timeless value-investing principle of acquiring more than what you pay for is hard to execute in a world where stock prices seem divorced from their fundamentals.