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Strategies & Market Trends : Value Investing -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Madharry who wrote (78723)	12/13/2025 11:10:30 AM
From: Elroy	Respond to of 78741

Seems funny to me that after you almost hit the nail on the head with your answer of 5% probability of a random stock outperforming the market you are willing to pick google against a portfolio picked by a bunch of smart guys. It's not the same question. I picked a specific stock (GOOG), which we all undestand fairly well. A random stock would be drawn out of a hat. If you pick a stock that seems likely to grow sales and profits for decades, and it does, the odds that you beat the market rise significantly, probably 90% such a stock beats the market. A random stock is unlikely to grow for decades. Last year the worst decision I made was selling META . This year the worst decision i made was selling GOOG, Both times I followed the lead of pundits as opposed trusting that management was smart enough to figure it out. This tendency of people to "trade" is why I think GOOG probably easily beats a well orgranized, educated, experienced, smart professional investment team over the long term. GOOG management just has to stear the ship down the most profitable path in an industry which it dominates and understands better than any competitor. The investment team has to continually find stocks that will outperform GOOG, and when they find a profitable one and it works, but they think it's time of outperformance has ended, they have to sell it, pay taxes and find a replacement (which may not work). I guess one explanation of my view is I think it's easier for GOOG management to to run GOOG for a few decades than it is for the investment team to pick stock winners each year over the same time period. GOOG has the advantage (it's market position and knowledge), while the investment team may be as good as such teams can be, but there are other similar teams competiting with them all over the world. The investment team has an advantage over the "dumb money", but not over the market. The amount of smart money is orders of magnitude greater than the dumb money, I think.

To: Madharry who wrote (78723)	12/13/2025 11:15:23 AM
From: Sean Collett	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 78741

RE: GOOG To be fair to GOOG Paul was one of the first here (I think) adding them when sentiment was bad but I also recall Elroy, Petal, a few others and myself have a debate about them and it seemed clear to me GOOG was undervalued. When Jim Cramer was saying “I’ve left Google. Now, I didn’t leave it at the right price, I know that, but I left it because I don’t use Google other than for the most simple historical stuff, because there are other ones that I wouldn’t go to. I won’t go to Grok to find out whether Hoover was president. I’ll still use Google for that, but I just find myself using so many other things, and I know I can’t be alone, and that’s what I worry about. I know YouTube’s doing well, though.” that was probably the time to really buy. In August 2025 I wrote on post 77962: And here we are just a few months later and Gemini is starting to eat some of GPT's lunch. GPT also released 5.2 and it feels even less valuable than 5.1 did. August 25th the price for $GOOGL was $208.49/s and today it's 309.29/s. Alas, I also made the mistake of selling too early on this one. I got 40% gain in a quick run for my portfolio and exited for some reason instead of following my processes and just trimming. Oh well. Happy investing, Sean