The slow way, made survivable Chapter 11 of 23 Svenska

The map · Part One · The method · Chapter 11 of 23

The decision

Never 'a buy'. A buy below price X, under conditions Y, with stop Z, all written before the money moves. The discount demanded scales with how well the owner believes he understands the business. About 8 minutes.

The method's fourth operating rule reads: a stock is not "a buy". A stock is a buy below price X, under conditions Y, with stop Z, and if you cannot specify all three the work is not finished.11Framework §0 rule 4. This chapter is about those three letters.

A buy price with its conditions and its stopA vertical scale. At 100, a blue square marks the base-case value. Between 100 and 85 a light blue band marks the cushion, with a blue line at 85 labelled the most the owner will pay. An orange circle at 93 marks today's price, labelled above the line, wait. Lower down, a vermillion line with a cross marks the stop. A purple box lists the written conditions. value, base case: 100from the owner's own growth viewthe most the owner will pay: 85value × 0.85 (tier 1), 0.75 (tier 2), 0.65 (tier 3)price today: 93above the line: waitstop: sell if it falls hereset before entry, never afterconditions, written down:the catalyst still dated,no hard kill in the latest figures,the stop entered firstprice per sharea buy below X, under conditions Y, with stop Zthe tool reports the distance to X and whether Z is breached;it never says buy
Never 'a buy'. A buy below a stated price, under stated conditions, with a stated exit. All three are written before the money moves, and the tool only reports where today's price stands against them.

X: the most the owner will pay

Chapter 8 produced the owner's base-case growth view. Chapter 7's arithmetic, run forwards with that view, gives a value per share. That is the owner's estimate of what NAME A is worth, and it is wrong by an amount nobody knows. So it is not the buy price.

The buy price is the value multiplied by a cushion, and the cushion depends on how sure the owner is. The method calls the levels of sureness tiers, and there are three. A tier 1 name, one the owner understands well and which has a strong balance sheet and something durable pushing it along, gets a buy price of 85 percent of value. A tier 2 name, less sure or in a cyclical business, gets 75. A tier 3 name, where the reason for owning it has had to be re-described along the way, gets 65.22Ruling E90, 2026-08-30. Tier is not a feeling: it comes from a conviction score built from gates passed, warning signs and good signs, and tier 1 additionally requires a fortress balance sheet and a secular tailwind. 'A score alone does not make a tier 1.' The cushion is there to absorb errors in the model and in the inputs, which in this project's own reviews have typically been five to fifteen percent of value. It is not there to absorb the business doing badly; the low-case growth view carries that, and it is printed beside the buy price as information, not folded into it.

The buy price is printed with two companions: the same price recomputed with the discount rate half a point lower and half a point higher. The owner sees how much the number leans on a rate that is, by the method's own admission, a preference. A proposal that the tool should veto any decision that reverses inside that band was refused, with a reason worth quoting: such a rule could only ever remove a conclusion, never produce one, "and this framework's diagnosed defect is that it cannot say yes."33Ruling E29. 'Fragility is DISPLAYED, never ADJUDICATED.'

Y: the conditions

A price alone is not enough. The name must still be inside the reading that produced the value: the dated event that was supposed to make the market look again must still be on the calendar, the latest report must contain no hard kill, and the growth view must be the one on record, not a revised one. If the company reports between the valuation and the purchase, the valuation is redone. A buy price struck on figures that have since changed is not a buy price; the tool marks a value struck on a superseded method or on figures it can no longer rebuild as nulled, not as slightly old.44Rulings E39 and E87.

Z: the exit, decided first

Before any purchase, the owner writes a stop: a price at which the position is sold, whatever the story is at the time. It is set when the owner has no stake in the answer. Once the shares are owned, every reason not to sell will seem compelling, which is precisely why the number was written earlier. The tool refuses to treat a held name as complete without one, and reports a missing stop ahead of everything else on the page.55A held name with no stop is a blocker, reported before any verdict. Framework §6.4 also names thesis stops: sell when the reason for owning is gone, such as a second cut to the company's own forecast.

What the tool does with all this

It computes X from the value and the tier, because both of those are the owner's inputs and the multiplication is not a judgement. It refuses to accept X typed in by hand; doing so fails the run with a conflict, because a buy price that did not come from a value and a tier is a number with no origin.66README: 'Writing an mbp: key by hand fails the run with a provenance conflict.' The cushions in force are 0.85, 0.75 and 0.65; an earlier set, 0.80, 0.70 and 0.60, is kept in the code only for three figures struck under it and marked as superseded wherever they print. Every night it reports the distance from the settled price to X, and whether Z has been breached. It never says buy. It says: 4 percent above the line, or 2 percent below it, and the rest is the owner's.

The cushion in plain language

How much of a discount you demand should depend on how likely you are to be wrong, and how likely you are to be wrong depends on how well you understand what you are buying. A business you have followed for years, with no debt and a tailwind, you may buy at a modest discount to your estimate, because your estimate is worth something. A business you can only half explain, you should buy only at a steep discount, because your estimate is mostly guess and the discount is doing the work. The tiers put numbers on that, and the numbers are the same for every company in the same tier, so the owner cannot quietly grant a favourite a smaller cushion.

Decided
A decision is three written numbers, X, Y and Z, produced in that order, before purchase. X is computed from the owner's value and tier and may not be typed in.
Why
A decision that exists only as a feeling of confidence cannot be checked afterwards. Three numbers with dates can.
Cost
Nothing is bought quickly. Between a company reporting and the owner being permitted to act, every figure is re-read and the value re-struck. Opportunities that require speed are not opportunities for this method.

Sources for this chapter

  1. Rules for the buy price, the tiers and the stop — read from this repository: reference/FRAMEWORK.md §0 rule 4, §4.4, §5.3, §6.4; reference/FRAMEWORK-EDITS.md E29, E39, E87, E90; vss/rules.py; vss/valuation.py

The slow way, made survivable. Built 2026-09-13 from the repository as it stood that day. NAME A and NAME B are fictional; no company, price or holding appears on this site. Not financial advice: one private investor's method, shared as it is.