Steve is way more experienced an investor to be "learning" with...

Steve is way more experienced an investor to be "learning" with our money. He says he employs a "value" style. This is not really true. I perceive Value to be also associated with Quality. I think Steve is looking at stocks from a net-net point of view where you are looking at net asset value and if it trades lower then it is investable.

Unfortunately today this usually means businesses of poor quality. Coupled with the long term state of the economy, ever lower interest rates and a market geared towards future earnings growth Steve's net-net stocks have been consistently punished.

You say that Steve should have learnt his lesson? I've been following him since the early 2000's Intelligent Investor days and back then he still had blow up's with the same type of "extreme" stocks like TIM and ROC. Intelligent Investor also had a sister site called Float Tank which reviewed IPO's. I remember them turning down at stocks like JBH and DMP when they IPO'ed at $1-$2 simply because the company had to fund growth via debt and that most of the IPO proceeds were being used to pay the existing owners. Short term thinking at its worst.

I can recall Steve's investing strategy has worked big time ONCE for him. RHG, where the market was marking down a multi billion dollar low doc loan book during the GFC. This ended up multi-bagging but it could have gone either way if RHG were not able to refinance and/or offload their debt. For a while I thought Steve had found another RHG in RNY, but that ended blowing up badly and Forager got out.

You will find with most investors (professionals and amateurs alike) will only have a very few number of stocks which go to the moon and that is the key factor in performance. Peter Lynch could not have outperformed the market with a basket of 1400 stocks if 1-2 of them didn't have outsized returns.

FOR is a complete punt of an LIC. Low quality, turnaround plays and being pretty much fully invested. If you enjoy a small money punt on an LIC this would be one to have a go on IMO. At least you have a chance of more upside given its discount compared to LIC's which hold large liquid companies where you would be better served with an ETF.