Charlie Munger said it with his usual lack of patience: “All intelligent investing is value investing — acquiring more than you are paying for.” It sounds like a tautology until you notice how much of the industry is organized around forgetting it.
Walk through any brokerage app and you'll find strategies sorted like cereal boxes. Growth. Momentum. Quality. Thematic. Each one marketed as its own discipline, with its own ETFs and its own influencers. But hold any of them up to the light and ask the only question that matters — what am I getting, and what am I paying? — and the categories dissolve.
Growth is value with a longer runway
When Buffett paid 25 times earnings for See's Candies in 1972, the Graham purists winced. It wasn't a cigar butt. There was no discount to net working capital, no margin of safety you could point to on a balance sheet. The margin of safety was in the future: a brand so loved that See's could raise prices every single year without losing a customer. Buffett wasn't abandoning value investing. He was doing it properly — valuing something invisible that the market had priced at zero.
The label changed. The arithmetic never did.
Every great growth investment is exactly this trade: the market extrapolates the present, you correctly price the future, and the gap between those two numbers is your return. That gap has a name. It's value.
What this means for the rest of us
If all good investing is value investing, then the job is always the same: find situations where price and worth have come apart, and have a reason to believe you see it before everyone else does.
Which is why insider buying is such a strange and wonderful signal. When a director writes a personal check for shares on the open market — not options, not a scheduled plan, their own money at the market price — they are making a value judgment about the one business they know better than anyone on earth. They are telling you, in a legally binding public document, that price and worth have come apart.
Most people never read those documents. The filings pile up at the SEC, dry as kindling. But strip the labels off, remember what the game actually is, and Form 4 starts to look like what it's always been: a list of people who think they're getting more than they're paying for — signed, dated, and notarized.