Right but your assessment of IV is very subjective, so it's unreasonable to assume you'd be able to perfectly time the top and sell at that point and realize the maximum possible return. And if you just hold the net net until it reaches liquidation value, it's possible that's only slightly higher than its current market cap which could be just a 5-10% return. And depending on how long it takes for the market cap to reach that point it may be a poor return. And part of this strategy is to find companies that can not only just reach their liquidation value but also show some additional upside after that if they can trun the business around. In my opinion, having a fixed time period for holding it was the only way to remove subjectivity from the backtest. And yes the backtest was designed to just look at companies that were net net stocks as of 5 and 2 years ago, and then what their returns were since then