stock market coulda/shoulda/woulda

[Sclass]

I try not to get too upset about these things because it doesn’t do to much for my bottom line.

Idiots. I should’ve bought XYZQ. You are 100% wrong.

Somewhat idiotic. I bought XYZQ and I sold it early. You’re 50% wrong.

Brilliant. I bought it, sold it at the peak before it was investigated as a Ponzi scheme/bubble popped/smelled smoke. 0% wrong.

Before I get too mad at myself I like to reflect on the huge difference between 50% and 0%. It’s the same difference as 100% to 50%. I wasn’t even close.

What I’m saying is this line of thinking is delusional. It’s the mentality of losers. Yes you could’ve would’ve should’ve but you didn’t. Keep obsessing about it and you won’t reach up and grab one of the many deals that is flying by your head at this very moment. And be poor.

Stop dealing with you inner lion of the past and start dealing with your inner chicken in the present. One of my mentors told me “Sclass stop dreaming about hitting the lottery and go out and buy a f..king lottery ticket.”

If you play enough you’re gonna have some regrets.

I started out with some stories but I deleted it all. I have some whopper missed opportunities, I sold $4000 of AAPL in 1995 because I chickened out. Sounds bad but it was easy to do under the circumstances. Nobody remembers the long slog from PowerPC to iPhone. It isn’t as easy as it looks. Likewise I have held NVDA for a decade now and it was difficult seeing it lose 50% recently. But I learned from my AAPL “mistake”. Don’t be too hard on yourselves. It’s really hard to get the entire trade right.

ETA - anyone remember Forest Gump buying AAPL? Did he hold it?

[unemployable]

What I’m saying is this line of thinking is delusional. It’s the mentality of losers. Yes you could’ve would’ve should’ve but you didn’t. Keep obsessing about it and you won’t reach up and grab one of the many deals that is flying by your head at this very moment. And be poor.

You can, and should, learn from your mistakes though. I've met with billionaire hedge fund managers who 20 years later still talked about stocks they should've held on to when they went from $2 to triple digits. Specifically, it was John Paulson in 2009.

[Henry]

I think it's delusional to think you ever completely get over your mistakes. They live on in some manner.

Warren Buffet has sold AAPL numerous times and Charlie Munger busts his billionaire balls over it.

[Henry]

Likewise I have held NVDA for a decade now and it was difficult seeing it lose 50% recently. But I learned from my AAPL “mistake”.

Today is far from difficult. Up 22% after hours.

[Sclass]

Yeah good thing I held my horses.

I did pick up a lesson or two.

Sometimes you just have to hold on. Sometimes you have to bail out. I realize if I just held everything and took losses on the bankrupt stocks I’d likely be richer today. Stocks have wild swings. Somehow just being in seems to do very well. I think there is some saying about time in the market vs. timing the market but I cannot recall it now. Time in beat timing? Anyhow, I sell a lot less now.

[loutfard]

2009. I was sitting on a considerable amount (to me) of cash in a savings account. I should have dumped it all into the stock market and rented. I used it all and went into a lot of debt to buy a house.

[Sclass]

You can, and should, learn from your mistakes though.

@unemployable Agreed. Definitely replay your blunders in five views with slo mo HD to make understand the line of thinking that got you there.

But don’t obsess over it too long. What I was trying to get across is how unproductive it is to go into an emotional spiral of regret mixed with dreams of what could have been when reminiscing about a missed opportunity. What people fail to reflect on is how far off target they actually were. They think they were close but the difference between hitting the mark and missing is vast when you blow either the entry or exit on a trade.

We have all heard it at the cocktail party, family reunion, dental office…”if I had just bought…”

It is a common response. I think it is natural to indulge oneself in these kind of emotional releases. There is some element of pleasure in it when one relishes what could have been. I see exactly the same emotional gush from people reminiscing about some significant other that they had it all with but blew it for selfish reasons. “If I’d just opened up more, been more sensitive…he she wouldn’t have left. ”

It looks really painful to relive this stuff but I think there must be some element of pleasure in it.

I’ve had to listen to this kind of talk for years from friends. I should have bought that house, car, stock…,”. It’s some kind of coping mechanism. And I find this activity very counter productive. Near misses are misses in a game where hitting is everything.

ETA - since we are name dropping I was friends with Larry Tesler at the time I dumped Apple in 1995. He was really bearish. One night at dinner he said he couldn’t take it anymore and with Steve Jobs coming back, that was the last straw. He had resigned. It was that bad. The company really didn’t have a business anymore. Windows/Intel had won in the market. Apple Newton had been taken all the way to market and crashed dramatically. Software vendors stopped developing for Mac. Larry was really depressed but said it was the right decision to bail. Most of the people at that table are dead now. Many told me years later they dumped their shares the following Monday…and regretted it after ten years.

Larry was probably one of the smartest guys I ever met. I was lucky to have known him when I was young. But I never thought he had a great mind for business and Jobs probably wasn’t going to keep him very long. He was the kind of research lead that would come up with brilliant ideas that costed millions but would never go to market. He like almost everyone else in that circle is dead.

This was Palo Alto in 1995. Everyone owned some AAPL at that point. It was like owning PG. I don’t know anyone who held it. All I hear is the regret stories twenty years later.

[unemployable]

ETA - since we are name dropping I was friends with Larry Tesler at the time I dumped Apple in 1995. He was really bearish.

And it would be another 10 years before Apple really took off. I recall a couple really bad earnings misses in particular around 1999-2000 when everything else was soaring.

Apple's problem was they never could figure out the marketing or the mass appeal. Why do you need to pay twice as much for a Mac as a ][e, or twice as much for that as a Commodore 64, and what do you really need a Newton for in the first place? That all changed with the iPod, and part of my skepticism was that they wouldn't figure it out with that, either, or a much cheaper competitor would come along — and today, they still cede the low/middle markets to other guys.

My mistake was I was basically afraid of success. Wasn't used to it.

[Henry]

But don’t obsess over it too long.

You learn more walking a mile with grief than walking a mile with joy. Some poet wrote that shit. And since we fail our losses more than our wins, I think they need to be addressed with long fucking walks. There are wedding photographers but no funeral photographers. Ultimate symbol of pain aversion.