Value creation is incremental & slow, but market recognition is explosive & fast.

A company's intrinsic value grows like clockwork. It is slow, steady, and unsexy. Quarter after quarter, they stack cash and compound earnings, yet the stock price just sits there, many people give up here.
Then, suddenly, the market wakes up. Wall Street catches on, and three years of fundamental growth get priced into the stock in three weeks.

As Benjamin Graham said:
*In the short run, the market is a voting machine but in the long run, it is a weighing machine.*

The hardest part of value investing isn't finding the value but it's having the patience to wait out the quiet, incremental, boring, lonely, and anxious phase.
The value creation happens momentarily but the process of waiting takes months, years.