I am bashing out this blog as a result of a conversation with a mate which was along the lines that he finds it hard to hold things for the long-term and tends to bottle it at some point and end up selling when a decent Profit has built up; but often this might not be the best approach. Even a bit of a numbskull can figure out that if you continually sell Stocks after making perhaps 40% Profit, you will never ever get gains of 200%, 300%, etc., which are the ones that really transform your overall Returns.
Buying high quality Stocks and then holding them for long time periods has many advantages and of course many drawbacks. The benefits are really around ease of execution and low activity; which of course can lead to lower Dealing Fees and costs, and effort around selecting Stocks and general Portfolio Management activity.
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I often think of subject matter that is way too short to justify its own blog, yet at the same time far too long to just send out via a Tweet and also I would like to store such stuff in the Website Archives so it can be retrieved by anyone who wants it; and of course with Tweets they tend to be quite ephemeral and soon lost in the River Twitter. On the basis of that, I am envisaging that this blog will cover a few possibly unrelated subjects but at least they get captured in ‘black and white’ electron imagery for the future.
Stay in control of your Position Sizes This is something I see so often and I know I have fallen into this trap many times myself in the past. It’s a very simple concept where we buy into a Stock, and we quite like it, and we give it perhaps 4% of our Portfolio and then we leave it to do its stuff. Then it turns out that this one is a real beauty and it keeps steadily pushing higher and after a period of time we find that it has grown to be much larger and could even be up to 12% or our Portfolio or more. If we have a very focused Portfolio with maybe just 10 Holdings or something, then a Stock like this could easily grow to be 20% or more.
I am extremely grateful to Michael for providing this Guest Blog and making my life easier this week, which has also enabled me to make very good progress on the Stock blog I am working on. I am sure most Readers will already know of Michael as these days he is a huge celebrity in the Private Investing and Trading world with regular articles in Investors Chronicle and SharePad etc.
Michael has a Website and if you go to the ‘Weekly Performance’ page on WD1 you should find an image of his FREE eBook and if you click on that you will be taken to his site. The book is well worth reading and of course I am biased because I was involved in the latter stages of proof-reading and tweaking it. You can find him on Twitter as @shiftingshares. So big THANKS to Michael for letting me share this with WD Readers and I hope you all enjoy it. Cheers, WD.
This is the Second Part in a small Series of just a couple of Blogs and you probably need to read Part 1 first for this to really make much sense. You can find it here:
http://wheeliedealer.weebly.com/educational-blogs/you-dont-want-to-be-over-thinking-things-part-1-of-2 Macro Stuff This is personally a tough one for me. I am fascinated by Macroeconomics and Politics and as a result there is a huge problem that I most likely give far too much weight to Macro issues when it comes to managing my Portfolio. I envy people who just seem to be able to blindly ignore Macro and as much as I try to do it, I just tend to find something in the Outlook that worries me.
I am sure that in much of my scribbles over the years I have touched on the subject of ‘Over-thinking’ but perhaps not really brought it all together in one blog that hopefully puts the subject nicely to bed. The essence is that I get a strong sense that I have spent many many years learning things about Stocks and Markets and Investing and Trading, and all the related stuff, but it is only in more recent years that I have been actively trying to ‘un-learn’ much of the stuff I know and be a lot more basic and elemental in my approach.
Less is More. Keep it simple. Complex is bad.
A few months ago I produced a series of Checklists to be used when Buying particular kinds of Stocks and then some while later it hit me that I ought to produce one for those very high risk, often loss-making, start-up type businesses on AIM that I avoid on the whole but occasionally I will buy into one. Before getting stuck into this particular one, here are Links to the other ones I produced – in fact this is the final one but it has Links to the others:
http://wheeliedealer.weebly.com/educational-blogs/normal-portfolio-buy-checklist-quality-at-a-fair-price-buffett-stock
In the Investors Chronicle dated 17th to 23rd May 2019 with ‘The Activist Effect’ as the main headline on the front cover, on page 32 there is an article called ‘Fund Managers are human after all – that’s the problem’, which makes a very good read although it is perhaps a bit ‘academic’. I guess that is where I come in and if I am doing my ‘job’ correctly then I hope I can convert what seems academic into something that normal people can digest.
It was written by Nilushi Karunaratne and the high level summary would be that Portfolio Managers make good Buying Decisions but make poor Selling Decisions – and the interesting bit is that some of the conclusions are perhaps worth taking onboard ourselves as Private Investors (assuming you are not a Portfolio Manager reading this !!) because, contrary to what many people think, institutional investors are often no better than we are (and many are worse). And the simple fact is that human psychological biases apply whoever you are. Later in my Conclusion bit I will address what we can learn.
Clearly this is Part 2 of these particular Blogs and you can find Part 1 here if you have not already endured it or you need a refresher:
http://wheeliedealer.weebly.com/educational-blogs/only-the-unprepared-panic-part-1-of-2 What can we do to control ‘Panic’? However much experience we have and however much we prepare and work to reduce the negative impacts, to an extent I think feelings of Panic are pretty much inevitable although perhaps with time we Panic less and it is more a feeling of mild anxiety than a full-on Panic Attack. Anyway, bearing this in mind, it is really about what can we do to lower the dangerous occurrences of such feelings and to reduce their severity when they do strike? I suspect the ‘solutions’ come in 3 categories: Forward Planning, Careful Portfolio Management and Psychological Techniques.
The ‘working title’ for this Blog when it was just a mere whisp of an idea in the WheelieBonce was ‘Only the Inexperienced Panic’ but the more I thought about it the more I felt this was a bit insulting and in reality we all panic but there are ways we can reduce such episodes and I wanted to talk about how to do this.
As usual with my Blogs, a lot of the ideas just come out of thin air and no doubt my Brain is triggered by something which seems unrelated that I then twist (probably much too far) into a topic loosely related to Investing !! My inspiration for this one came from the icon Thomas Weekes on ‘Misfit Garage’ on Discovery Turbo when he came out with the line, “My old daddy used to say, only the inexperienced panic”, and that cemented the thought in my head.
As always, if you have not endured Part 1 yet, you really should read it first or none of this will make any sense (I am not guaranteeing that it will make much more sense even if you do read Part 1 but at least you might have a fighting chance) and you can find Part 1 here:
http://wheeliedealer.weebly.com/educational-blogs/you-cant-time-the-market-part-1-of-2 In Part 1 I outlined why “You can’t time the Markets” comes about, but what are its flaws? |
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