This is what I don't understand about the stock market. I guess you just have to buy into capitalism being efficient for it to make sense. While stocks are fairly liquid, they're just a representation of the value of the company, which is only really materially useful if the company is being bought any time soon. So if you're doing fundamental research, and you go, holy shit this company is amazingly undervalued, like deepfuckingvalue did, where is the guarantee that the market will ever realize that? He kept losing money for about a year until it turned out he was right, surely there are stories of people where it takes much longer and just bleeds you dry. You can look through all his post history, it seems like a ton of his calls expired with him losing thousands each time, before he finally turned a profit.

Even investopedia agrees

However, the fact that fundamental analysis shows that a stock is undervalued does not guarantee it will trade at its intrinsic value any time soon. Things are not so simple. In reality, real share price behavior relentlessly calls into question almost every stock holding, and even the most independently minded investor can start doubting the merits of fundamental analysis. There is no magic formula for figuring out intrinsic value.

If I'm wrong, hopefully someone can explain