Do you have investment regrets?

Coffee
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Please share so that we can reflect and learn :slight_smile:

My two regrets are related to not buying houses.

No other regrets.
Investments strategy is 80% global ETFs buy and hold and 20% “cash”.

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Not buying real estate in 2010 - and too high share exposure before/in the GFC.

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Starting to invest very late in life

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Suppose you had held on to an investment you bought that went on to do 10’000x.

Yeah. That one.

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Being a PC gamer and knowing about BTC back in the days when it was still in the 1-10$ range. But thinking „what kind of crap idea is that?“ and moving on playing videogames instead of mining millions in todays dollar.

Then later using a 3080 and 3090 to mine ETH and double down by buying even more ETH. I‘m still holding those 5.5 ETH which could have been 0.4 BTC too.

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Here’s my top 3:

  • Forced exit of home ownership due to divorce in 2009 (missing out on 400k gains so far)
  • Investing in Russia and being hit by sanctions in 2022 (34k unrealized losses)
  • Limping away from 2008 and exiting the market in 2012 and realizing 30k losses, then waiting until 2017 until restarting to invest

S&P500

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Biggest regrets: stock picking, not investing in gold and BTC
Proudest achievements: stock picking :grin:, time in the market instead of timing it

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  • Starting too late
  • Chickening out/not buying enough/selling (nVidia, other single stocks)
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I have two main regrets:

  • starting to contribute to my 3a not from the beginning of my career;
  • only becoming aware of my spending around age 30, nearly ten years into my career.
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I regret having had regrets.

I probably spent thousands of hours trying to optimizing things that cannot be optimized. Once it was clear to me that you simply cannot trade lows or highs except for pure luck, things started to change for better. As a typical Swiss I searched for compromise. Not highs, not lows, but nice wins and low losses.

But two examples from the 90s always come to my mind. I had two stocks with more than 100% gain. Spanish Telepizza and Priceline. Telepizza had a going private, made a few 100%. There are shops now in every corner of Spain, was exactly the right product at the right time… and the pizzas are actually good.

But the real hammer was priceline. By then you could put an offer for a plane ticket, a hotel or for renting a car. Original and worked. then they merged into booking.com and I would have made probably a few thousand times what I sold for.

The biggest mistake in investing is not buying crap. It is selling too early. One of my mottos therefore: “hold as long as possible… but not longer”.

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You keep repeating this,
But I keep not understanding. :grin:

What makes the stock “not possible to hold any longer” for you?

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  • Not having implemented an investment strategy as early as May 2020 when I had taken care to educate myself on the issue during April 2020, the month I learned about this forum and the importance of keeping a budget to save and invest those savings to become “rich” instead of holding cash in a 0% savings account.

  • Not investing in Bitcoin in 2017 just after it crashed, even though my brother had started researching it as part of his Master’s degree. At the time, just after the crash, I also thought it was just another scam.

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When I have to sell. The details depend on the strategy and all strategies do implement “hold as long as possible but not longer”.

As I said, it is pure luck to trade on highs or lows. I use a point system to decide what to sell. And I always hold at least 6 months, so I adhere to the Swiss non-professional status rules.

I trade a dividend system which always finds enough good stocks to buy. So it is a pull system, whenever a position is sold a new one is opened.

Then I trade a momentum system which hardly finds any stocks to buy. This is a push system, whenever a position is bought something else is being sold.

It is a bit more complicated because of money management with margin. But basically this is the idea. Hold as long as possible, but not longer. No need to keep a loser forever, but you can only lose 100% (which I never did), and you can make many 100% (which I do quite often).