Love a bargain? How about a sale within a sale?

— -- If you're a value investor, you like bargains. What if you could buy a value fund at a discount? That would be like a clearance sale at Costco or 50 cents off from the dollar store. But you can now buy several value funds at a discount price, and a few of them are genuine bargains.

Value investing is a school of stock analysis based on a few fairly simple propositions. The first is that stock prices can rise and fall dramatically over time. The second is that sometimes they do so for fairly stupid reasons, giving investors a chance to buy the stocks of good companies cheaply.

For example, Apple, creator of the iPod, the iPhone and the Apple computer, cost $194.84 on Jan. 2, before swooning to $119.15 by Feb. 26, a 39% decline. The stock now sells for about $179, or 9% less than its starting point this year.

Was Apple really worth 39% less in February than it was in January? Not likely. One could argue, with the benefit of hindsight, that Apple was a screaming bargain at that price.

The dark side to value investing is that some companies whose stocks have fallen sharply are just stinkers, or wildly overvalued in the first place.

Many value funds have been clobbered this year because mutual fund managers snapped up cheap stocks that were merely awful. Legg Mason Value Prime, for example, once outperformed the Standard & Poor's 500-stock index every year for 15 years running, thanks to manager Bill Miller's eye for spotting bargains. This year, though, the fund has plunged 27.6% — 15.7 percentage points more than the Standard & Poor's 500-stock index has.

One problem: Miller, like many other value investors, owned a big slug of financial stocks — about 22% of the portfolio, according to Morningstar, the mutual fund trackers. Value investors tend to gravitate to financials because such stocks often carry low prices, relative to earnings, as well as decent dividend yields. But bank stocks have the unfortunate habit of melting down every decade or so, catching value investors flat-footed.