By now you must have read or heard about the sudden crash in gold price. This was after gold had been trading sideways for about 2 years since its initial drop 3 years ago. Alongside gold and gold miners, metals and mining stocks have crashed to historically low valuations, of course as always, no one really knows where the bottom is and the trend remains firmly negative. However, the fundamental principle of value investing is to firmly accept mean reversion as the defining characteristic of equity markets and buy at sufficiently low values. The sad thing is that markets are observed to be abnormally volatile when they are at extremely low valuation levels and that is exactly why value investing is hard to do even though it is simple to understand. Most people simply do not have the stomach for the increased volatility at low ......