A Decade In The Making…a 10-Bagger & a 26.0% pa Investment Track Record

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Alphabet, annual review, benchmarking, buy and hold, COVID, crypto, Donegal Investment Group, GARP investing, growth vs. value, KR1, multi-bagger, portfolio allocation, portfolio performance, track record, Universe Group, VinaCapital Vietnam Opportunity Fund

Looking back, I must admit I never imagined reaching this kind of anniversary…but yeah, the Wexboy blog turned 10 years-old earlier this month! A journey that kicked off with this Sirius Real Estate buy (at an astonishing 0.31 P/B!) in Nov-2011. Which was obviously a stock-picking tour de force – noting SRE‘s been a 7-BAGGER+ since. Well, except I somehow managed to distract/scare myself out of the position two years later…for a mere double-digit gain! And maybe that’s where this post should abruptly end, because:

The one BIG lesson most investors still need to learn is how to HODL!

But let me be clear up-front – this is not intended to be some lessons-learned victory-lap post. As investors, we never really know what’s coming down the road…next year could be a celebration, or a total humiliation. And we all make dumb mistakes, we repeat them, we live with them & we finally move on – great investors just make less mistakes. And we can’t afford to get disheartened, or to rest on our laurels – great investors (should) never stop learning & adapting ’til the day they finally exit this great game. To assume/pretend otherwise is to tempt the gods, which makes investing such a uniquely weird mix of confidence…and humility.

That said, this year & last year have been an accelerated learning experience for me – as is presumably true for all investors (& everyone we know). And yes, I know I’ve promised to write about this – and hopefully share some positive learnings & useful advice – particularly in light of my actual FY-2020 & YTD-2021 performance. But I gotta admit, I keep putting it off…because now I desperately want & need it to be a final epitaph for this (Zero-) COVID hell we’re still stuck in. [Despite most of the world getting vaxxed since!?] So yeah, that’s obviously something I gotta work on…

But meanwhile, I’m thrilled I’ve actually managed to deliver that unique & rarest of beasts…a public/auditable 10-year investment track record via the blog (& my Twitter account). I obviously don’t disclose the actual euros/cents of my portfolio, albeit my long-abandoned career & my family’s security/future clearly rely on it – which means return of principal is just as important to me as return on principal, in true family-office style – but readers & followers have always been able to assess my level of conviction/risk tolerance via my specific % allocation in (disclosed) stocks, and via (essentially real-time) tracking of my (rare) incremental buys/sells in those stocks.

And in return, I’m far more interested right now in seeing readers draw (& even share) their own conclusions – privately, or publicly – from my stock-picking & investment track record to date. To facilitate that, here’s my annual returns…complete with links to my annual performance review & actual stock-picks/investment write-ups for each year.

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FY-2019…Hella Surprise Of A Year!?

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absolute valuation, Alphabet, annual review, buy and hold, coronavirus, Cpl Resources plc, Donegal Investment Group, Ebola, GARP investing, growth stocks, isolationism, KR1 plc, populism, portfolio performance, Record plc, relative valuation

It’s still January…so by now, I’m sweating to wrap this up by month-end (at the very latest!), while you’re probably feeling besieged (& bamboozled) by the media’s parade of talking heads who seamlessly re-write their broken #2019 narratives & still pitch their #2020 market prognostications with undaunted confidence. Which is a tad discouraging when I’m busy trying to come up with my own unique version & perspective…albeit, in the wake of a fantastic year (talk about looking a gift horse in the mouth!).

Seriously…name a market/asset class that actually declined!?

But rewind a year & check the gamut of their 2019 predictions, and (once again) you’ll remember/realise they’re full of highly paid shit! So before I even start – let alone, God forbid, pontificate – I’ll share the only piece of market wisdom you really need to know, above all else:

‘Nobody knows anything…’

And that quote’s about the movie business! Granted, for anyone who cares, Hollywood probably seems like the most impressive Rube Goldberg contraption in the world…but frankly, figuring it out is a total cake-walk compared to grappling with & predicting what might actually happen next in the markets & the global economy! But unfortunately, that’s how we all step up & play the game:

Like useless office work expanding to fill all available time…useless market forecasts expand to fill all available airtime & news holes!

Probably my greatest investing achievement in the last year was switching off the financial media – and yeah, I stopped paying attention to brokers years ago – is it any wonder I reported such negligible portfolio activity? [It’s a real travesty seeing #buyandhold investors re-classified as chumps over the years (& decades)]. And in reality, markets are primarily focused on trying to discount a 12-18 month time-horizon, which means a diet of narrative manufactured to simply explain yesterday & today’s market/stock zig-zags is just irrelevant & misleading anyway. And so, I recommend you do the same: Go on, just switch off that guy on the box, you know the one…he just happened to attend some ‘school in Boston’, and is now an instant expert on epidemiology and up & to the right #coronavirus charts! Again:

‘Nobody knows anything…’

So, Growth…or Value?

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Benjamin Graham, buy and hold, catalyst, growth investing, growth vs. value, investment theme, Joel Greenblatt, multi-bagger, Philip Fisher, reading, survivorship bias, value investing, Warren Buffett

Ah yes, the great investing debate & divide…

At one extreme, we have the wild-eyed growth investor foaming at the mouth over a great story. A silky-tongued CEO’s painted unicorns & castles in the air, and our reckless plunger’s itching to dance the magic rainbow. No price is too high, no management too sleazy, no risk too great, to deter him from the boundless opportunity he now sees stretched out in front of him… His investing idol’s Philip Fisher, of ‘Common Stocks & Uncommon Profits’ – which I had the misfortune of re-reading recently. How this book was ever nominated a bloody investment classic, I don’t know!? OK, let’s grant some credit. Yes, I’m sure Fisher was a gifted investor, but he was also in the right place at the right time – in California, at the dawn of the electronic (& venture capital) ages.

So, who’s ever sat down & really studied his book, and actually figured out how to bloody implement his 15 Points? Who among us has the time, the means, the resources, or the determination to practice 95% of what Fisher preaches? And where in the book is the real secret exposed – the foresight to pick a 100 or even a 1000–bagger? That’s the problem people forget with growth investing – survivorship bias. Consider a buy & hold investor seeding his portfolio with a selection of promising growth stocks – some die off quickly, most turn out so-so, but maybe one (or two) actually grow & grow to dominate his entire portfolio. Of course, the losers are long forgotten, and he’ll nod wisely & tell you he always knew the real winners! Or how about the chancer who bought a single long-shot stock…and ended up making a friggin’ fortune?! Well yes, he’s obviously a media darling now. But where are the stories about his fellow slobs who bet the ranch & lost everything? Well, like I said, the losers are long forgotten…

Not to mention the fact share prices of even the biggest winners usually suffer some pretty sickening plunges along the way. Of course, every growth investor’s confident he won’t be the sucker shaken out of his wonder-stock’s long-term parabolic trajectory by a mere trading blip. Learn from Black Monday ’87, he savvily reminds you – it’s a mere blip on the charts now! Yeah, but the average investor wasn’t calling it a blip then – he was too bloody busy selling…