What It Takes to Get Life-Changing Wealth

Dan Caplinger March 31, 2020  Mindset , Commentary

In hindsight, making money in the stock market seems easy. Just buy shares of promising companies, wait for them to achieve their full potential, and reap the rewards from their huge returns. Look at some of Stock Advisor's top performers over time — stocks like Netflix (NASDAQ: NFLX), Amazon.com (NASDAQ: AMZN), and Booking Holdings (NASDAQ: BKNG) — and that strategy seems to play out like clockwork.
It's easy to forget during long bull markets that there's more to successful investing than just waiting. Only in the midst of bear markets do we tend to remember the hardest part of staying on the path toward life-changing wealth: maintaining a disciplined strategy and staying confident in the companies that we've correctly seen as having the potential for greatness. All too often, investors lose their resolve — and that costs them dearly in the long run.

You want to avoid losses...

No matter how good your intentions are to keep a long-term perspective, it's human nature to judge yourself based on what happens in short periods of time. If you buy stock in a great company but the share price goes down right after you buy it, then you start to question your thought process for picking it in the first place. If it keeps going down, then the desire to sell it and take your losses can become almost overwhelming — even if absolutely nothing has changed about the underlying business and its prospects for success.
Facebook (NASDAQ: FB) is a great example of how this phenomenon can snare investors. Stock Advisor didn't recommend Facebook until years after its 2012 IPO, but those who bought stock in the social media giant back then saw the share price lose half its value within months after its initial public offering. Critics pronounced that those touting Facebook's prospects were fundamentally mistaken, and many disgruntled shareholders dumped their stock at what proved to be exactly the worst time. In the end, those initial investors did better than those who waited until Stock Advisor made its recommendation at a price double what you could've paid in the IPO.

...but you want to hold onto your gains even more

It's tough to watch a promising pick be a quick loser, but many investors find it even harder to keep their discipline on stocks that have already demonstrated their winning ways. When you've already earned impressive gains on a stock, having them taken away even temporarily can be especially painful. We've all seen during the coronavirus-driven bear market in February and March how years of steady stock price gains can disappear more quickly than you'd ever imagine. It's easy to beat yourself up for failing to see signs of risk that cost you much or all of the profit you'd had in your stock positions.
Moreover, the reasons to sell can seem quite compelling. Consider:

Shortly after our initial recommendation of Netflix in October 2004, the stock lost half its value as investors worried about competitors like Blockbuster Video trying to copy its DVD-by-mail service. Yet far more difficult to endure was the 80% drawdown in late 2011 and 2012. That's when CEO Reed Hastings and Netflix's Qwikster debacle led to hundreds of thousands of subscriber defections and made many investors forget the promise of international expansion, new proprietary content, and advances in streaming capacity and bandwidth.

Regulatory threats, competitive pressures, and a simple lack of faith in Amazon's long-term growth prospects have led to regular declines of 25% to 30% every year or two in the e-commerce giant's stock price. More dramatic drops of 50% in 2007 and 60% in the financial crisis stemmed from adverse market conditions and less of a willingness to accept CEO Jeff Bezos' philosophy of maximizing long-term growth at the expense of short-term profits. With many companies having failed during the credit crunch in 2008 and 2009 because of their failure to seek profitability more quickly, that reason for giving up on Amazon seemed even more compelling at the time than it does looking back.

For Booking Holdings, consistent doubts about competition and the state of the online travel industry have forced shareholders on multiple occasions to deal with pullbacks of 30% or more. Other than the Great Recession, the most jarring decline for Booking Holdings has come just in the past month, with shares having dropped more than 40% as investors weigh the likelihood for massive disruptions throughout the travel industry to last at least months and possibly a year or more into the future.

At the time when these stocks were struggling, few people would have faulted you for deciding to take some of your profits off the table. Long-time members who'd followed Stock Advisor recommendations since the service's inception could have sold their initial Netflix shares in late 2011 and still have earned a return of around 300% to 500%. You could've gotten a 2,000% return on Amazon selling in late 2014, or a 1,500% gain on Booking Holdings from a 2011 sale.
Yet doing so would've cost you a huge amount of additional gains that those who remained confident in the ability of those companies to bounce back from adversity and produce even bigger returns. You wouldn't be sitting on a 15,000% gain in the video-streaming specialist, a 12,000% rise in the e-commerce and cloud computing behemoth, or a nearly 5,400% advance in the online travel website leader.

Remember what you're investing for

At its most basic level, the purpose of investing is taking money you don't need now and making it grow until the time you do need it. From that perspective, as long as nothing important changes about a company's business or prospects, then there's no need to think about selling it until you approach your time horizon.
That's easier said than done. When stock prices are zigging and zagging violently, that kind of simple perspective is hard to achieve. The best investors, though, remain objective about the prospects great companies have to continue to succeed even in tough environments along the way. If you can keep that perspective and maintain your discipline, you'll be much more likely to join the ranks of those top investors.


All advice is based on information not confirmed. You are advised to consult with your professional advisor before using any information in this post.