Three stocks I regret (having sold them or never bought them)

I made a lot of mistakes and I have a few regrets concerning my investing journey over the last 15 years.

My main mistake has been to follow others by investing in stocks that didn't seem so good to me. But the conviction of others may make you lose your critical thinking. When you begin, it's very hard to be independant and don't be influenced by other's opinion, especially, the so-called experts (by the way, I now think that there's probably no experts in the investment world)

These last years, I haven't made big mistakes if I define a mistake as investing on a bad company or losing a lot of money with a bad decision. But there are a few stocks that were very good occasions that I missed because I thought the risk was too high while it wasn't. 

These three stocks were blue chips: super solid stocks with high margins and high ROE. They were all available at a very good price (between 10 and 15 times their earnings) in the last few years. Since, they all came back to a "normal" price for such high quality stocks (PE of 25-30).

These three stocks were Apple (AAPL), Netflix (NFLX) and Meta (META). 

Lesson learned: when a stock with margins over 20% and ROE over 20% is sold for under 15 times it's earnings, the chances that it would be a good investment are high. 

I don't think that betting 50% of your portfolio on one of these stocks would be a good idea (like Buffett who has 50% of Berkshire Hathaway on Apple) but 2-3% on one of them should be a no-brainer if they ever go back to such ridiculous price. 

Penetrator's portfolio performance in 2023

Yes indeed, 2023 is already over: A year full of fun, sadness, despair, hope, shit, travels and many more. A year full of mixed emotions and my lowest contribution to this site since I don't know when. Maybe I should just take a look at the right bar of the menu of my blog to know since when. 

For my portfolio, it's been the best year ever. The portfolio is up 45%.  

The S&P did exaclty half of that: 22,4%. 

When you own a considerable portfolio, that kind of performance makes a huge difference. 

However, during the last days, I reduced some positions because the stock market is at an all-time high and experience has told me that it's always wise to have a lot of cash left when the market is high. 

It may take 2, 6 or 9 months, but the stock market will go down by at least 10% sooner or later and many stocks wil go down even more than that during that period because the same news don't have the same effect on every stock.

And it's always during these periods that it's time to buy stocks. You can go wrong when you buy a specific stock that goes down but you can't go wrong when your favorite stock goes down along with the market. 

So, I'll start 2024 with a cash position of 8.8% of my total portfolio. That's not super high but that's gonna be enough to benefit from what god will offer me. Yes, god, the non-existent creature that lives nowhere. 

Penetrator: Absent but performing. 

Picks for 2024

Of course, this blog has been let down in 2023. But, I'm still there even if many people are probably gone. It's OK, I didn't know them anyway. 

What are your picks for 2024?

Limit of 5 picks per person, please! 

I'll go with 5 stocks I own because I don't see why I should recommend stocks that are not good enough for me:

1- Parker Hannifin (PH)

2- Microsoft (MSFT)

3- Google (GOOG)

4- Constellation Software (CSU.TO)

5- Stella Jones (SJ.TO)

Glamour and anxiety

As a blogger, this year has probably been my laziest year. I feel that inspiration will be back one day or another but, so far, I feel like I don't have anything to say. 

2023 has been a very good year on the investment level. My portfolio's performance has been so far almost 150% superior to the performance of S&P500. But the year isn't over yet and anything could happen. 

This year, I've diversified my portfolio. I used to own a lot of big positions in big tech names (Amazon, Alphabet, Meta, Microsoft..) but I felt that it became too concentrated on a single sector so I bought some other kind of companies like Grainger and Parker Hannifin, both great companies in the industrial sector. And I feel like it's been a good idea because these new stocks did well and made my portfolio more balanced. 

I've reached a very important milestone in november with my portfolio. That level was for me the official "anything could happen now, I'd be safe financially".  And now, I feel like all my earnings related to my job can be spent because saving them doesn't make a big difference. 

To manage to get there, I have to declare that I drive the same car since 2010. Very little glamour but very little financial anxiety too. 

Dollar General (DG)

I've recently become interested by Dollar General. The stock has dropped a lot after mixed results. As it looks, Dollar General shouldn't grow that much this year and investors don't like that. 

The stock went from about 250$ one year ago to about 125$ these days. And the PE ratio is currently about 15 which is low for such a defensive industry (immuned to recessions). 

All the dollar stores are usually sold for a PE of 20-25 and even above (Five Below is much more expensive). That's mostly why I chosed to buy some shares of Dollar General. Of course, buying a lot of shares for a significant portion of a portfolio is rarely a good idea with a new stock, but with 2-3% of my portfolio, I think that it's a rational stake for a very strong and defensive stock.

However, the debt level is a little high. But who cares. We'll all die someday and that kind of information won't matter anymore at this fatal moment. 

  

Tatoos

I've always hated tatoos. They are usually disgusting and they represent the fall of our western civilization. It's a tragedy to me to see so many people with tatoos everywhere I go. How could all these people think that tatoos make them more attractive? Just like how would a fucking ketchup stain on your clothes would make them more beautiful?  

What's more disgusting than someone with tatoos on their hands or on their face? Even small tatoos on the arms or the legs are ugly. It has absolutely no purpose. 

But we've been so exposed to tatoos that we're desensitized. Just like a lot of other things in life: a long exposition to something, as immoral or ugly as it is becomes normality.

It's like all these nonsense stocks with PE ratio over 100. It seems that every decade has it's nonsense stocks that are the new normal. It's been Microsoft or Cisco in the late 1990's. Then, it's been Marijuana stocks about 6-7 years ago. Then, it's been some tech stocks again in the last couple of years (Shopify, The Trade Desk, Sea limited...). 

When something looks strange or ugly, even if we're exposed a lot to it, it still remains strange and ugly. Sadly, our human condition makes us very weak and easy to influence. 

So, I bet that the next "new normal stocks" will convince a lot of us (maybe me included) that their valuation shouldn't be compared to all the other stocks on the stock market. 

9 years of Don't fuck with Donville

Last june, this blog was 9 years old. But before that, I was also a blogger who wrote in french. I wrote about my life and it was sometimes a real circus because I knew how to shock people (other bloggers) and create a kind of myth around who I was. 

I started blogging in 2005, when i was 26 years old. About two or three years later, it was the golden age of blogs in Quebec. There was hundreds of bloggers. Most of them were boring because they were writing very dull stuff about their life, probably thinking that they deserved some attention. Actually, they probably needed attention more than thinking that they deserved it. 

I became a well-known blogger because I wrote a lot about other bloggers, telling how boring they were or exposing without a lot of diplomacy their superficiality. 

I've eventually had some problems with my blog, saying bad things about my job and my boss. Nothing criminal or heavy, but not very nice things. So I changed my blog and started another one. Eventually, most bloggers faded away and maybe around 2013 or 2014, most of them were gone. 

That's probably why I started this blog in 2014: I felt I had said what I had to say about my life and there was no community anymore to get attention from. 

Then, I said to myself, why not writing in english about a topic that excites me and  that could me  reach a new audience. Also, with finance, I wouldn't be tempted to trash talk about some friends, girlfriend, job, etc... In hindsight, I'm totally able to trash talk about anybody on this financial blog but the topic helps me to stay focussed. 

So, I'm a blogger since 18 years. That's a lot.