You’ve switched investment strategies at least once. Maybe it was 2022 and value was suddenly back, so you rotated out of tech. Maybe it was 2020 and everyone was citing index fund studies, so you sold your stock picks and bought the S&P. Maybe it was earlier this year when someone in a group chat was crushing it with a specific approach, and you thought — just this once — you’d try it their way.

Here’s the uncomfortable part: most of us do this without ever asking the deeper question. Not what should I buy, but why do I believe this will work? What do I actually think about how markets function? Where does the edge come from — assuming there even is one?

Aswath Damodaran, the NYU professor who has spent four decades teaching…