First of all, I wanted to thank everyone here in the forum for the different ways you have inspired my portfolio in 2020. The thoughtful posts and experience-based wisdom I am obtaining from the posts have been invaluable.
Some background: I am fairly new to investment in growth stocks. I came across the Motley Fool platform a year ago and discovered this forum this summer. I have approximately 1 million invested in after-tax accounts and 300k in tax-deferred accounts. Approximately 80% of my stocks are in tech growth stocks (Shopify, ZM, Tesla, APPL, FB, BABA, Amazon, Crowd, DDOG, Teladoc, LVGO, Roku, TTD, and some other cloud stocks) the remaining 20% of my stocks comprise of index funds and other dividend or defensive stocks such as (T, BEP, O, CVS, STOR etc).
I’ve been humbled by the returns of the high growth tech stocks since March. The YTD performance of my portfolio is about 65%. In terms of my time horizon, I am about 20 years away from the traditional retirement age, but would like to retire within 5-10 years depending on my portfolio performance. I am also open to the idea of a semi-retirement when cut down half of my work and income in 5-10 years, work part-time so that I can keep investing.
I would greatly appreciate some thoughts and advice on a few things I am pondering:
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The only investment strategy I have been practicing is the Buy and Hold strategy. I haven’t sold any of my high growth tech stocks, but do add to them when there is dip and non of the fundamentals of the businesses have changed. Many seasoned investors lock their gains or limit their losses, would that be advisable? I am concerned about the tax implications as I am in a fairly high tax bracket. Is the Buy and Hold strategy tenable? Are there tax efficient strategies when trimming growth stocks that are in after-tax accounts?
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I do admit that it made my heart sink when I saw the 7% dip in my portfolio at the close of business day today and somehow wished that I had taken profits a bit yesterday, but I don’t think I have been an investor long enough to fully ascertain when to sell/when to hold forever.
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I reviewed my defensive stocks/dividend stocks, many of which haven’t made a profit this year at all. I am wondering if I should sell them and reinvest the proceeds into high growth stocks during the recent dip? It seems like these defensive stocks do add diversification to my portfolio and offsets the loss a bit especially on a day like today when there is a massive tech sell-off, but overall I don’t think these defensive stocks are helping my financial growth.
Thanks for reading my long post and I would very much appreciate any feedback and advice!
-NewGrowth Investor