An Ode to Diversification

Good grief! Whoa! Some over-reaction. I do apologize if I offended you. But I had no idea who first introduced this particular straw man and so I was certainly not accusing you of lying. I simply don’t know where that term came from. You use a sledgehammer to crack a nut: very few witting or unwitting erectors of straw men can be accused of lying, it is more a figure of speech, illegitimate certainly but not serious. It is so common it is a rare argument that does not include one!

On the minor point of your companies (which are strangely named if they are doing well) providing I am getting an acceptable total return, I would prefer not to sell them, interrupt compounding and crystallize a tax liability. In order to do that of course a cash balance is necessary for the new investment. These are also tenets of W. Buffett!

With best wishes and, if I could, I’d buy you a beer.

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With best wishes and, if I could, I’d buy you a beer. – strelna

Then we can exchange rounds! :slight_smile:

If you’re ever in Charlotte, drop me a line.

Rob
He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain what he cannot lose.

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Disney, 6x recommended, 14% of portfolio

Hi LNS, I’m wondering how you are figuring that. If all the initial amounts invested are the same, and the six recommendations of Disney are (rounding off), a 55 bagger, a 33 bagger, a 6 bagger, a 7 bagger, a 12 bagger, and a 4 bagger…they now total to 117 initial investments. I counted 218 total active recommendations (212 that were not Disney). How do you get Disney at only 14% of the portfolio?

By the way, by your own calculations, you have five companies making up 61% of the portfolio, and approximately 200 companies making up the other 39% of the portfolio (averaging about 0.2% of the portfolio each). Not the picture most people have of Stock Advisor.

By the way, I’ve been a subscriber for lots and lots of years, and get a lot of good ideas from the MF. It’s just that, as pointed out, there’s a big difference between a series of recommendations and a real money portfolio. None of the MF real money portfolios have done as well, and at least a couple have closed because of bad results.

Saul

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Hi Saul,

the math is straight forward: Each rec is worth 1 share plus its gains or minus its losses since inception.

Add this up across all the stocks and you get the total value of the hypothetical SA portfolio.

Calculating the weight of each stock is then obvious.

Disney is not the only stock that grew in value so anchoring at the number of recs doesn’t really work.

But I agree: SA is not about keeping a balanced portfolio. It is about picking companies with strong prospects in the hope that some of them will excel. I remember reading on the Fool that in most portfolios some precious few big winners account for the makority of the performance. It is surely true in the SA portfolio as much as in mine which outperforms the S&P due to Amazon and lately Shopify.

LNS

Each rec is worth 1 share plus its gains or minus its losses since inception.

Oh, that doesn’t work for me. It needs to be a rec is worth a constant dollar amount, adjusted for inflation. One share of Berkshire Hathaway is not the same as one share of INFN.

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Oh, that doesn’t work for me. It needs to be a rec is worth a constant dollar amount, adjusted for inflation. One share of Berkshire Hathaway is not the same as one share of INFN.

Not sure I understand. Question was how concentrated the SA portfolio is. If you invest the same dollar amount each month into each recommendation you end up with exactly this concentration. I did the math with 1$ each month but the concentration would be the same with 10$ or 100$ or whatever other amount.

Had you invested constant amounts in each stock since inception, Disney would be your largest position (in terms of value) followed by Netflix. No need to adjust for stock prices or inflation. This is how your portfolio composition would look like.

LNS

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What you originally said was:

Each rec is worth 1 share

What you’re saying now is what I wanted: Each rec is worth a fixed dollar amount.

sorry, a poor choice of words on my part.

I always meant one share of equal dollar size in the portfolio. Never meant one stock.

LNS