Friends,
Last week was tough for my (Stoffel, here) portfolio. I only own fifteen stocks, and many (Mercadolibre, Axon, RocketLab, Duolingo) were down double-digits. Looking at those losses can feel painful, disheartening.
It's enough to make some wonder: why even do this stock-picking thing in the first place?
While I was licking my wounds, I came upon two passages from my favorite thinker -- Nassim Taleb -- that gave me solace.
The first deals with the virtue of risk taking:
Life is sacrifice and risk taking, and nothing that doesnβt entail some moderate amount of the former, under the constraint of satisfying the latter, is close to what we can call life. If you do not undertake a risk of real, reversible or even potentially irreversible, harm from an adventure, it is not an adventure.
While I'm lucky that investing in individual stocks doesn't entail any physical harm (yet!), the risks of real-world loss is definitely present. Which -- oddly enough -- qualifies this as evidence of an adventure.
The second came from a talk he did with education specialist Bryan Caplan. In it, Taleb is discussing how he became good at math not from college courses, but by trying to survive as a trader:
When I started trading, under the pressure, you are so much in trouble, you have to think...You start high-dimensional matrices to get inverted by tomorrow morning, and you end up inverting them. You donβt know how you got the result. You show to a mathematician, they donβt believe you did it, and yet you did it.
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You push to do a lot of stuff under necessity. Necessity is the mother of invention. The stuff you do then that you learn under these pressures stay with you.
The takeaway from these nuggets: A certain amount of pain means you're living, hopefully improving, and definitely having an adventure.
The beauty in this: the lesson goes well beyond investing. It applies to everything in life that's worth it in the long run. So when struggles have you down, try to remember how lucky you are to be on this adventure we call life.
Wishing you investing success,
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Brian Feroldi, Brian Stoffel, & Brian Withers
Long-Term Mindset
P.S. It's Official, we are splitting up our YouTube Channel. Brian Stoffel is starting a new channel that will cover earnings, his portfolio moves, and more. Subscribe to his new channel by clicking here.
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