No. of Recommendations: 12
And which are those, certain / closed position early?
I am sometimes good at spotting a good deal and buying, but then I take a profit when it's no longer offering that discount margin of safety instead of leaving well enough alone. I have done that with any number of firms. Others, I have simply sat on my hands waiting for it to be conventionally cheap, waiting forever. I do lots of dumb things.
Some of them are great firms, others just seemed great to me, at least at the time--obviously my picks are not always good ones.
Google is the poster child. I stared for a decade or more before buying any.
Some picks I bought, then sold too soon to benefit from their long run returns. ATD.TO, Dollar Tree, Carmax, Apple. Some I've never owned, like DOL.TO or Costco.
Dollar Tree is a very good example.
I was buying in the stretch 2007-12-31 through 2008-01-08. I did do a table-pounding post at the time, on the Falling Knives board, though nobody cares.
That built my first "core" position at prices (3:1 split adjusted) in the range $7.64 to $8.69. Murphy's law dictates that the biggest buys were at the highest price, so my weighted average entry was a bit over $8.40. There is no dividend, so the math is easy: since then the return has been 18.18%/year compounded for 15.64 years, despite the 12% drop in the last week. That's a pretty good result for any stock pick, if I do say so myself. But did I get that? No, I traded around the position for a while, and within a couple of years I had none, using the money to buy other things.
I did get back in again on other dips, and repeated several times. When it was really cheap, I occasionally bought calls. My IRR has been wonderful, but as mentioned, ignoring the leverage I probably would have been better off just buying that once and sitting on my duff thereafter.
I have become pretty good about throwing in the towel and bailing on something I no longer believe in or fully trust, whether it's a good price at the time or not. I don't just sit and wait for something good to happen to a pick I no longer believe in. I had nice profitable exits from WFC, Tesco, BAM. Also WMT at the end of one bubbly run. My fundamentals uneasiness is sometimes beneficially magnified by my tendency to want to sell when a price is good. Others I bailed and took the loss, like my most recent position in BABA (nice small loss as it was just some high strike calls). Or Nokia, back in þe olden days. And IBM of course.
Jim
