No. of Recommendations: 15
Sent home from work, left with a lot of time to research and pay attention to the mania of the "grocery store resetting prices in a frenzied way" market, I found my attention drawn to the cruise stocks in early 2020.
This became a true value play in mid-March. There was a moment when I realized that my reasonable expectation of the fire-sale value of these ships, minus the debt load of the big cruise lines (Royal Caribbean, Carnival, and Norwegian, all publicly traded),was such that these were a screaming value play. They were down about 85-90% from where they were in about October/November 2020.
Were people going to never cruise again? Were we all going to get taken out by the 'vid? I didn't think so, and I backed the truck up that day. That was my singular largest outlay for stocks, in raw dollars, of my entire life (the other two buys that day were Disney and Apple).
They recovered, and then some, over time. That few hours of work reading balance sheets was probably the highest effective hourly rate I'll ever see in my lifetime, as I sold them at a tidy level of appreciation.
We don't get these opportunities very often, but those of you that have been watching these things for some years learn to smell them, with experience. I was able to take advantage 2009 similarly, though at much smaller dollar outlays. I didn't know what I was observing when the .com collapse occurred.
Is this coming again? Sure...one day. Keep your powder dry. I'm sort of out of this game (playing the new one of "what to withdraw and when" which is very different than "buying at good prices and patience and compounding"), but it is still fun to watch.
