I agree with you. I sold both Nvidia and Arista at their all time highs. Did so in real time. What I did with Nvidia was many months later played Nvidia earnings for a day thinking things could not be that bad (this was part of my forgetting my rules in late 2018). It was just another lesson in don’t play earnings, and cheap is cheap for a reason.
But with Nvidia we all knew there would be new S curves to climb. With Arista, again in real time, 100 gb/sec had petered out and it had no new game. When Arista boomed on S&P 500 I sold, was out, gone.
Nutanix was always controversial, but it seemed too good to be true (one I should not have been in, but in the end was convinced when Nutanix finally took #1 marketshare for a quarter (undisputed). This was in mid 2018 I think). Had a double, ended up with a disappointing 50% return in less than a year.
As for current Nutanix, we just did a crowdsource on it. Our conclusions were most definitive.
Zscaler, turns out to be disappointing. So disappointing I again, like Nutanix, only got an 11 months 50% return when I had more than a double. Believe it or not, we actually began discussing our concerns about Zscaler last summer with the top down sales model. It occurred to me that given their only 118 ARR they needed to grow new customer numbers year after year to keep growth up, and that would get more and more difficult. I stuck with it however until that first disappointing quarter and got out. Gave Zscaler the benefit of the doubt. Works sometimes. Sometimes it does not. But don’t hold it hoping it will happen when obviously it won’t.
Consistent with all of these, I made tons of money, I NEVER bought when they were textbook cheap (except when I played earnings that one time and you see what I got), I did buy when they were dirt cheap (in our way of thinking), and I moved on when it became clear narrative no longer equalled real world facts. I remember one time when Nvidia fell under $100 and there was doom and gloom that this psychological point had been breached and with Morgan calling for it to fall to $30. I scooped it up in droves in the $90s for more than a triple.
Elastic has been one I have “agonized” over trying to figure out the markets dislike for it. Had some very good discussions in regard. Lots of good about Elastic, but then again, it is letting Datadog run all over them. Elastic is a tough one. I owned it several times for a few days, but always sold it out. Just did not feel right.
But I agree, one needs to move on. One needs not to collect stocks. I’ve made mistakes not in choosing what I hold, but in turning over what I hold before its time (SHOP) is the biggest culprit and studying why. Zoom may be of a similar nature (heck is of the same nature presently). But no, I don’t own it. Many do and have done what I did not with it. Just keep holding it. That is probably the most difficult decision of all with rare such companies.
Tinker