No One Wins Them All, and That Is Ok

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One purpose of this site is to let anyone so inclined look over my shoulder at the moves I make in the portfolio I manage for separate accounts and the exchange traded fund we sub-advise. When a decision is made to by or sell something I post about it a day or two later--obviously I don't announce a trade here before I place it for clients.

As I say frequently, an actively managed portfolio is a series of decisions and hopefully more of those decisions will turn out to be correct than not. A byproduct of these posts disclosing trades is that people often point out some risk or other form of drawback to stock or the trade. If you write openly you should expect various forms of criticism and after eight years and counting it is not a surprise.

The point here today is not to try debate any commenter on Seeking Alpha but to point out that in buying or selling something there is a risk of being wrong. In selecting a stock to buy there are pros and there are negatives. Every great stock that has ever existed had or today has negatives. When a decision is made to buy something, then hopefully whatever the analytical process was, found the negatives, the big ones anyway, and took those negatives into account.

However much research goes into picking a stock it is not likely that every little thing that exists can be found but hopefully the big ones can be. Any investor who routinely gets blindsided probably needs to figure out another way. Getting blindsided occasionally might be an occupational hazard however that fits in with no one being able to be correct every single time.

Unrelated, there is a potentially interesting 30 for 30 documentary on ESPN tonight about the extent to which so many professional athletes squander their millions. It will be interesting to see if the timing worked out that Curt Schilling gets any mention. His story is that he saved up a bunch of money and put it all (so he has said) into a video game company that he ran and then the company went bust. Aside from putting a lot of people out of work (tragic on a societal level) he did not hold back a little bit of a personal cushion just in case. He worked this summer for ESPN as a baseball analyst and while I'm sure that pays well I doubt it will replace the tens of millions he lost.