I feel your pain! Take a look at the chart for the last couple...

I feel your pain! Take a look at the chart for the last couple of years at TOT for a bit of a case study in what happens when you lever up to buy office assets at the very top of the market.

I've recently been reading some of the old school investment classics and in particular enjoyed "The Most Important Thing" by Howard Marks.

In that book he talks about how hard it is to beat the market in general and how long term the only real way to do it (while also managing risk and not just looking for short term momentum trading) is by seeking out "inefficiencies" in valuation (more likely to be found in areas of the market that attract the least amount of interest) and taking somewhat contrarian view points.

I reckon we've stumbled across some version of this concept with DXC.

My initial investment case was that the big NTA discount was unfair and that while the property portfolio would fall it wouldn't be hit as hard as what the general market seemed to be pricing in as there has always been evidence throughout this SP decline that petrol stations were still changing hands around the cap rates that DXC had them valued at (very different to office where for a long time there was no clear direct market evidence of how much valuations had fallen as there was a bit of a mexican stand off between potential buyers and sellers).

Over the longer term I think it's a bit inefficient because a lot of REIT investors take one surface level look at petrol stations and think it's a dying industry due to electric cars. The recent large acquisitions in the space with Seven Eleven and OTR were made by what we can presume with some confidence are well informed business people who clearly see a different but still profitable role for these properties going forward.

In terms of my own investment I actually started buying too early at $2.90 in December 2022 but averaged down over the next year so I'm now sitting at an average cost of $2.60 and have collected some good dividends in the meantime.