Benjamin Graham, who invented Mr. Market in 1949, was careful to point out that the partner's daily quotes are not analytical statements. They are emotional ones. When Mr. Market arrives at the door each morning with a new asking price for a business he has already quoted a thousand times, he is not telling you the business has changed. He is telling you that he has. The cash-flow statement of The Coca-Cola Company looks essentially identical at $78 a share and $52 a share. Coca-Cola did not become forty percent worse at making fizzy drinks; Mr. Market became forty percent more frightened of the world.

We watch his moods because the rest of his customers do not. Most of the financial press operates on the assumption that price moves require explanation — that a six-percent drop in Apple means something, that the Federal Reserve's footnote on the third page of the FOMC minutes changedsomething. Sometimes it did. Most of the time the prices moved because Mr. Market had a bad night's sleep, or read something in the newspaper, or watched too many short videos on his telephone before bed. He is, after all, a person.

Coca-Cola did not become forty percent worse at making fizzy drinks; Mr. Market became forty percent more frightened of the world.

The Tape we publish each morning is, at heart, a measurement of his mood across a small set of businesses we know well. When a majority of names sit at a positive Δ — meaning intrinsic value exceeds Mr. Market's asking price — he is in a depressed mood, offering things on sale. When most names sit at a negative Δ, he is manic, asking too much. When the names are mixed, his mood is unsettled, and the patient owner waits.

Today the Tape leans sober. Of the names we follow, none are flagged BUY by the strict twenty-five-percent margin of safety, and only one — Coca-Cola — is offered below the line of fair value at all. The high-quality consumer names cluster within five percent of intrinsic value. The technology names appear cheap on paper but only because the protocol's discount rate, applied verbatim to high-growth businesses, produces results that the protocol's author himself anticipated needing to dampen. We dampen them. The remaining picture is one of a market that is, today, neither generous nor cruel. Mr. Market has slept reasonably. He is asking reasonable prices. The reasonable response, on most reasonable mornings, is patience.

That is the unromantic part of the work. Most days nothing happens. Most days you publish the same numbers, with one or two of them having moved by a percent or two, and you wait for one of two things. Either the businesses themselves change — which happens slowly, in the cash-flow statement, on a quarterly cadence — or Mr. Market does something dramatic. The dramatic moments are not predictable, but they are, eventually, frequent. Coca-Cola was offered for under fifty dollars in March of 2020, and again, briefly, in October of 2022. Mr. Market was, on those days, in a state. The patient owner wrote a cheque. The cheque cleared.

What we are doing here, every weekday morning, is keeping our eye on a man who almost no one else is watching closely. Most of the financial press is watching the news. We are watching the partner.

— The editors