Among American equity portfolio managers, there are two basic approaches to the stock market. Of course, everyone tries to figure out what the future value of a given company’s stock will be. But

—growth investors do so by making forecasts of future profit growth. They look for companies where they think the consensus belief–manifested in the current share price–underestimates either what the strength of future earnings and/or the length of time a firm will produce surprisingly strong results.

—value investors, in contrast, look for companies whose assets they believe are undervalued by the market.

Put a different way, a growth investor know with a great amount of certainty when his calculations will be proved right or not (as results are announced publicly) and with less certainty what they will be. A good recent example is Nvidia.

For a value investor the reverse is true. If he’s done his homework he’s confident that the value of a company’s assets is far greater than the current share price, but he’s more in the dark about when an event will occur, like a change of management or a takeover bid, that will reveal the undervaluation and begin to remedy it. A good example of this is Robinhood.

Typically, the growth approach works best in up markets and the value approach in down markets. One of the quirks of today’s US stock market–and by extension the mutual fund/ETF market–is that professional investors are strongly incentivized by pension consultants to remain in “style boxes,” that is, to concentrate exclusively on one of the two approaches. And, as it turns out, the 21st century has been, so far, unusually cruel to value investors, many of whom have migrated to private equity or other forms of non-liquid investments.

To my mind, one consequence of this last development is that value situations can be extremely lucrative, as well as providing some degree of protection against a general market decline.

As regular readers will know, I’m a died in the wool growth investor. But I got my start and spent my first six years in a value shop, as well as a decade later on as the principal growth investor in what was a heavily value-oriented organization. So I do know something about value investing.

I’m also finding that over the past few months I’ve been increasingly responsive to value ideas. For what it’s worth, I’m reading this as my unconscious telling me to become more defensive.