"..when you can be somewhat assured that the risk of permanent...

"..when you can be somewhat assured that the risk of permanent loss of capital is very low, under extremely conservative assumptions (looking through a through-the-cycle lens)."

This is self-evidently true, for anyone except a price speculator. But of course, what is or isn't "extremely conservative" is a matter of opinion. And where the middle of the cycle might be, is also.

When I pulled the trigger on MND it was based on a gut feel that fear was extreme, and a guesstimate of what very pessimistic cashflow projections might be. I knew that national mining capex was still likely substantially above GDP levels. But I chose to ignore that little factoid.

If I had known then the degree to which the capex figures were being bloated by oil & gas, and the degree to which MND was riding O&G, and thus how much further MND's revenues had to fall, would I have pulled the trigger at that point?

I'm really not sure. Perhaps it was my ignorance that helped me pull the trigger. If so, then I got lucky.