Selected excerpts from the Knowledgebase -2

Selected excerpts from the Knowledgebase -2

I’ve decided to do a daily small excerpt from the Knowledgebase as sort of a thought for the day. In many cases they will have extra thoughts of mine, or small updates. I hope you’ll find them interesting.

Saul


Here’s the second:

I pay no attention to 2-baggers, 5-baggers, 10-baggers or whatever in individual stocks, nor do I count them. This is relevant because this way it never crosses my mind to think anything like “This stock is slowing down, but it’s a 9-bagger. Maybe I should hold it for another year to try for another 10-bagger.” Going from a 9-bagger to a 10-bagger is only an 11% gain. If I’m no longer in love with the stock, I should be able to put the money into a new stock that will be up 30% in a year, and it will never even cross my mind that I missed having a 10-bagger. Here’s another way to think about it: If you have an 80-bagger on a stock that grows to an 85-bagger it sounds exciting, but it’s only a 6% gain on your money. If you take the same money and put it into a new stock where you just get a tiny little 2-bagger, you’ve made a 100% gain on the same money. Which is why I don’t pay attention to trying to get multiple baggers. If they happen, fine, but it’s not my focus.

If you were to put a small amount of money in every stock listed on the market, you would eventually pick up every 10-bagger, even every 100-bagger, that occurred. You’d be able to brag that: “I have fifty 10-baggers now, and three 100-baggers!” But so what? You’d just be doing as well as the markets as a whole, by definition, as you’d be investing in the whole market. And since you just invested about a hundredth of one percent in each stock, your 10-baggers would be meaningless, and even your 100-baggers would only move your totals 1%. So again, anyone can pick up lots of 10-baggers by just investing in hundreds of stocks, more if your hundreds of stocks are MF picks certainly, but the multi-baggers are irrelevant. What matters is how your total portfolio has done. If you have ten 10-baggers in 25 stocks, that’s darn good. If you have ten 10-baggers in 500 stocks, so what? I pay attention to how my total portfolio is doing. My goal, and my entire focus, is now on averaging 20% to 25% per year on my entire portfolio. As I pointed out above, having a multi bagger on my whole portfolio is what counts, not on individual stocks.

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