Having been a perpetual lurker, I submit my first post...
What a great honor that your first SI post would be for the Thread Portfolio Survey. Thank you.
I was PM'ing Nosmo_King earlier today to tell him "what a great thread this is". It really is. Great people, many backgrounds, all willing to share.
So I guess I'll share a change in my portfolio. Yesterday, I bailed out of EXDS and INTF.
EXDS: excellent company, great management, growing space with B2B infrastructure support thru web hosting. I got out, with multi-bagger returns despite a 50% collapse recently, because of the increasing competition in this space and because they don't have a "lock". The manual says to hold royalty "lightly"; at 1.5% of my portfolio, this I did. The manual says to ditch royalty at the first sign of declining revenues. I delayed several days after posting my report here on the Conference Call last week, and lost some more of my profits. Overall, I like the company, love the management......but the lack of a lock, excellent but slowing revenue growth, and loss of momentum say that it's time to move on. I'm looking to get in to SEBL or NTAP. EXDS was a great learning experience for me, and I'll probably continue to follow them for awhile.
INTF: I took profits at EXDS in March, near its 52 week high, and felt really smart. I plowed these into INTF based on a Project Hunt report, which we all felt was extremely well done. I bought in at $72, and was especially encouraged by the brokerage report placing an expected share price to $150/share. The brokerage firm was the same one which came to employ the Huntsman. I had also received a PM of a rumor of a 3:1 split. I liked the fact that it was a B2B software move, that was relatively undiscovered. Well, it's been in freefall the past few weeks, falling more steeply than the overall market. Yesterday it fell to single digits after a disappointing quarterly report.
I've never lost so much money in so short a time.
Fortunately, my only shiny pebble was 0.5% of my portfolio. But I'm going to have to give a lot of lectures or perform a lot of outside consulting to reaccrue that same amount of after-tax money.
INTF may be everything and more that was so well detailed in the Hunt report. There may be no plausible reason for it to have lost 80-90% of its value in a month or so. Nevertheless, I sold off after reading the quarterly report.
Lessons learned, and still learning:
1. Get to know management; I failed on this one.
2. Ignore the "impulse" buying urge; I'm pretty good on this one in the grocery store. Have to get better when browsing wall street.
3. If following up on a recommendation, for which a purchase of stock is my responsibility alone, know well from where that recommendation comes. For example, if a John Stichnoth or a StockHawk or a Mike Buckley, to name a few, make a recommendation, I'm going to look hard at what they have to say because I feel I 'know' these guys over the last 12 months more than someone who is relatively new. Even if the latter is very competent and very sincere.
No dispersions meant on any new people here. But when I ask myself what I would do differently, one would be to take a second and third look when getting information from a lesser known source. It still gets back to DD, and I didn't do enough. Bottom line; everything I made in EXDS in the last 10 months, was wiped out by INTF.
4. Jill and others have repeated that you have to know when to fold 'em. I learned I'm pretty lousy at figuring out when to sell.
I wanted to share this with my favorite thread, so others might not repeat my mistakes described herein.
Best to the Thread,
stan |
