Everyone knows Coke is a wonderful business. The price knows too.

That sentence is true. It has been true for most of a century, every serious investor already agrees with it, and none of it is a secret. It is also, on its own, worth nothing to anyone deciding what to own.

A fact that everybody already knows has already been paid for.

The first question in research is whether a business is good. Most commentary stops there, and it is the easy half. The second question is what today's price already assumes about that business, and where the assumption might be wrong. Every position in the four models is a bet on the second question.

Three current holdings are read that way below, one widely admired, one widely criticized, one widely argued about. In each case the thing everybody knows and the thing actually being underwritten are different.