Peder Prahl shares a key lesson learned over 15 years: value investing fails without growth. Triton's strategy evolved to strictly require growing markets and profit pools, merging cost-side discipline with top-line potential to avoid stagnant, low-return assets.

Contrary to the dominant narrative focused on US tech giants, data shows European banks and a global deep value approach have outperformed the 'Mag 7' over the last one, three, and five years. This highlights the importance of looking beyond popular headlines for actual investment performance.

A key driver for renewed interest in European equities is not just a search for value, but a strategic move to hedge against volatility in the US AI sector. Investors, while maintaining their AI holdings, are allocating new capital to Europe to diversify and mitigate risk from the AI complex's price swings.

The tendency to invest heavily in one's own country, known as home country bias, is a widespread and historically costly mistake. Global diversification typically provides lower risk and smaller drawdowns while still capturing market growth, as the next big winner is unpredictable.

A successful 15-year strategy of overweighting US equities was reconsidered when the P/E multiple discount for the rest of the world reached an unprecedented 40%. This shows that even the most durable investment theses have valuation limits that trigger a strategic shift toward more balanced, benchmark-like weights.

Howard Marks argues that you cannot maintain a risk-on posture and then opportunistically switch to a defensive one just before a downturn. Effective risk management requires that defense be an integral, permanent component of every investment decision, ensuring resilience during bad times.

A robust global value strategy first identifies the world's most undervalued countries using long-term metrics. It then performs a bottom-up analysis to select the most undervalued large-cap stocks within those cheap markets, creating a concentrated portfolio of out-of-favor opportunities.

Beyond its primary role of reducing drawdowns, trend following acts as a premier diversifier that can solve several portfolio construction flaws at once. It can dynamically allocate to foreign markets (solving home bias), value stocks (when they're trending), and real assets like gold and silver, providing exposure that traditional portfolios often neglect.

Despite its recent reputation as a high-risk, 'radioactive' asset class, authentic value investing is fundamentally about risk mitigation. The core principle is to purchase assets with a substantial margin of safety, creating downside protection, which is the opposite of a risk-seeking approach.