Warren Buffett: “People Still Don’t Want to Think It Will Work”
Quick Read
Buffett argues widespread disbelief in value investing is the strategy's actual edge, keeping mispriced securities available for patient, disciplined buyers.
U.S. corporate profits hit $4,393 billion in Q1 2026, up 12% year over year, giving value investors strong earnings raw material to work with.
Sather recommends starting with Peter Lynch's One Up On Wall Street before tackling Graham's dense Intelligent Investor to build the same core habits.
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Critics have been writing the obituary of value investing for more than 40 years. The strategy keeps refusing to die, and a recent episode of The Investing for Beginners Podcast explains why the skepticism itself may be part of the edge.
In the segment "What 'Invest With a Margin of Safety' Really Means," co-host Andrew Sather points to a long-standing Warren Buffett observation that value investing "either instantly catches with you or it doesn't." Sather paraphrases Buffett's commentary in The Intelligent Investor, where Buffett noted that "even though there's been these great track records and it's all public and you can see it, people still just don't want to think it will continue to work or just works at all."
That resistance was already entrenched in the 1980s, when critics first declared Benjamin Graham's framework outdated. Buffett's counterpoint was that disbelief is the feature, not the bug. As long as most market participants dismiss the approach, mispriced securities keep appearing for the patient minority willing to do the work.
Why the Math Still Favors Patient Investors
The underlying premise of value investing is that share prices eventually track corporate earnings. The earnings side of that equation has held up. U.S. corporate profits reached $4,392.5 billion in the first quarter of 2026, according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis, growing 12% year over year. Domestic profits alone reached $3,826.8 billion, with the financial sector contributing $894.4 billion.
Profits have climbed from roughly $3,172.5 billion in the first quarter of 2022 to today's level. That kind of steady aggregate growth gives value investors raw material to work with. When a high-quality business trades below the present value of those cash flows, Graham's margin of safety concept gives the buyer a cushion against analytical error, recession, or sentiment shocks.
The On-Ramp Problem
Many readers never get to that cushion because they bounce off the source material.
