hi ggamer,
i am sorry to hear of your problems. however, i would say look on the bright side: you are still relatively young and probably have your peak earning years ahead of you. that is a good thing--many older people who lost it all will never be able to recover. i would recommend that you take this opportunity to consider what is the most intelligent approach for the balance of your investing career.
is that approach to be in 100% G&K stocks? not for me. i will grant you that GG has the allure of making a lot of money quickly. after all, the first thing i see upon opening my copy of The Gorilla Game is the inside dust jacket, which informs me that i could've turned $10,000 into more than $3 million if i'd only invested in CSCO stock back early on; and how much i could've made off Yahoo, etc. i'm sure this kind of marketing helped sell more copies than if the book were packaged as a dry business-strategy volume.
unfortunately, the corollary of any get-rich-quick strategy is the possibility of getting poor even quicker. if you read my posts on asset allocation (or better, buy and read some of those books which are not get-rich-quick schemes), it will give you a context to see GG focuses on just one small part of the entire market of assets. and throughout history, one small part of the market has NEVER had extremely good times without extremely bad times as well.
while one may do extremely well if one finds an asset class at its low point and sells it at the high point, it is unlikely that anybody can do that consistently. that is why it makes sense, IMHO, to hedge one's bets by investing in various different asset classes.
like recent comments by others, i too look at GG as very interesting from its business-strategy implications. but as a sole method of investing for individual investors with a limited time horizon (EVERYONE has a limited time horizon), it would not surprise me to see this approach disappoint severely.
although there are some thread contributors who invest in a variety of assets (like Bruce), i get the feeling that the main thrust of G&K has been to be 100% or nearly so in these stocks. a simple review of the G&K portfolio surveys suggests this to me. personally, i wouldn't devote more than 5% of my portfolio to these stocks as part of my (attempt at a) prudent asset allocation policy. it is not that there is anything inherently bad about them; rather, they are just one asset class among many, and i would not expect one class to outperform for long without a correspondingly horrible period thereafter. |
