Net net

Just don’t. Unless you have a stammer and can’t help it.

“Net-net” is a value investing technique developed by Benjamin Graham — Warren Buffett’s guru, that’s who — in which a company is valued based solely on its net current assets. Users of this expression, should they be talking about matters financial, usually mean just “net” — that is to say, assets minus liabilities. Somehow “net-net” has become a fashionable way of saying “at the end of the day”, or “in the long run”, or “when all is said and done”.

In the long run we are all dead, as Keynes said, as indeed will anyone be, to me, who uses this ghastly buzzword.

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