I buy shit companies cheap, with a reasonable chance they become less shitty.
Tangible bargains, not stories.
That's the whole strategy. Everything else here is just the fine print.
This site documents a deep-value portfolio of obscure, unloved, asset-heavy companies from all over the world, run under a published rule set with real money. Cheap against tangible assets comes first. Surviving long enough to matter comes second. A good story comes dead last.
Everything here is built to be checked. The rules are public. The portfolio reconciles against actual broker statements. The research cites its sources, including the ones that argue against me.
Three doors in
The story. Why this strategy, why me, and why now: I ran this approach loosely from early 2024, the results were good enough to take seriously, so now it's systematic and in public. Read the story →
The rules. The full mechanical rule set: what counts as cheap, what counts as surviving, position sizing, and the exact math behind every sell target. No black box, no "proprietary model." Read the rules →
The record. The live portfolio, verified against broker statements, cash drag and mistakes included. See the record →
Before it went live here, the same process returned +54.17% over roughly two and a half years of real-money testing (March 2024 through August 2026, audited through my broker's own reporting; details and caveats below).
What to expect
Company write-ups on a fixed schedule: forensic teardowns of individual stocks, each one stating up front whether it's a Buy, a Watchlist, or an Avoid, and exactly what price would change that. Most names that clear the screen still end up rejected, and those get published too. A rejected idea is research working, not research failing.
No signals, no hot takes, no macro forecasts, nothing personalized. If a post ever tells you to hurry, unsubscribe.
Subscribe to watch the basket get built in real time, mistakes left on the page. That's the offer. It's free.
The whole site, one screen
Start Here — you're on it.
About — who's writing this, why this strategy, and the audited record from the 2024–26 experimentation phase.
Methodology — the full rule set: the cheapness matrix, the survival screen, sizing, adds, and sell math.
Does this actually work? — the evidence for and against this whole approach, with a browsable library of every source. The nerd-out page.
The Piotroski F-Score — the survival screen explained: what it is, the research, the honest case against it, and the four changes I made.
Walter Schloss's sixteen rules — the 1994 memo this whole thing descends from, mapped rule by rule to how this site implements it.
Portfolio — the live basket and its performance, verified against broker statements.
Company Write-Ups — the research itself, plus the company index.
Trade Log — every buy and sell, dated and reasoned. Coming once the first trades post.
Archive — everything, chronologically.
About
Who's writing this. Tangible Bargains is written pseudonymously by a U.S.-based accounting, internal-controls, and compliance professional who applies the same skepticism to balance sheets on the side that the job applies to audit files during the week. The publication is independent of that job — no employer resources, no confidential information, no implied endorsement from anyone but me. I don't know your risk tolerance, your tax situation, or your time horizon, and nothing on this site is personalized advice. I'm showing you exactly what I own, exactly why I thought it was cheap, exactly what would prove me wrong, exactly what I paid, and exactly how the whole thing performed, including the parts that didn't work. What you do with that is on you.
Where this came from. This isn't my first attempt at markets. In early 2024 I found the corner of the internet where people still quietly run the Walter Schloss playbook, and it made immediate sense to me — I read financial statements for a living, so buying a dollar of hard assets for fifty cents is the one kind of investing that has ever felt native to how I think. I started doing it with real money in March 2024, loosely at first, no published rules. It worked well enough that pretending it was still a hobby stopped making sense, so I audited the whole run through my broker's own analytics, wrote the rules down properly, and built this site to run the strategy the way it deserves.
The record from the experimentation phase. Everything below describes the prior personal account I ran from March 2024 through August 2026, before this site went live — not the account this site tracks going forward, which starts from zero on the Portfolio page. Figures are time-weighted returns from Interactive Brokers' PortfolioAnalyst reporting, not my own math.
Cumulative, March 6, 2024 through August 14, 2026: +54.17%
By year: 2024 +13.62% · 2025 +27.71% · 2026 through August 14: +6.25%
Sharpe ratio: 1.29 · Max drawdown: 11.57%
Two and a half good years is evidence, not proof — it's short, it overlapped with a strong market for the kinds of things I buy, and none of it guarantees the live account repeats it. It's here because it's why the site exists, presented the same way everything else here is: verified, dated, and with the unflattering parts left in.
The portfolio is real. Tangible Bargains tracks actual personal capital, not a hypothetical model. Results include cash drag, execution prices, spreads, dividends, and losses, on purpose. The point of publishing a live portfolio isn't "copy my trades" — it's making the research honest. If a position drops 20% and turns out to be a mistake, the mistake stays on the page. This is not a signal service: completed trades post after they're executed, on a fixed schedule that has nothing to do with when I happen to be trading.
AI does the drudgery. A human owns every conclusion. Research tooling helps pull filings, normalize financial statements, and flag anomalies faster than doing it by hand. No automated output is treated as true because a machine said so — every material number is traced back to a primary filing, every report is reviewed by a human before it goes up, and if the primary source couldn't be found, the write-up says so instead of quietly filling the gap.
Disclosures. Deep value has real academic support and real multi-year stretches where it simply doesn't perform, and pretending otherwise would be exactly the kind of story-selling this whole project exists to avoid. Tangible Bargains is a personal research publication, not investment advice. Nothing here is a recommendation to buy or sell any security, and nothing is tailored to any individual reader's financial situation. The portfolio shown is the author's own capital, disclosed for transparency and education, not as a signal to replicate trades. Do your own research; consult a licensed professional before making investment decisions.
Tangible Bargains is a personal research publication, not investment advice. Nothing here is a recommendation or is tailored to you. See the disclosures above for the full detail.