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This is Scott Becker with the Becker Business and the Becker Private Equity Podcast. Today's discussion is Investing with Conviction. Palantir, Amazon and Microsoft. So here's the issue over the years is I've become a slightly better investor and not always. I have a core investment strategy which is I invest in index funds, invest in Treasuries, in addition to that, periodically invest in individual stocks. One of the things I used to do was have a quick conversation with somebody and then the explore part of my portfolio. Invest in something without any great conviction at all. This led me to invest in a couple ETFs a few years ago. A Bitcoin ETF, a cannabis ETF. These both ended up being a disaster. One, because I invested with them on a whim. Two, because I ended up selling the Bitcoin ETF before it rebounded like it's rebounded the last couple years. But in any event, the mistake in both those was that I invested in them without any sort of clear thought about why I'm investing in them. And so that was sort of like a mistake. And it led me also, because I never clear a conviction to sell them for tax losses. At some point the cannabis tax loss made sense. Ultimately, the bitcoin ETF tax loss I would have been far better off holding. But that's a different story. But if you invest with conviction in the first instance, you're not so intent on selling when things go bad. So here's the sort of next step of this. When I invested in Paleontia, invested in it with the concept that Peter Thiel's a genius, that they'll continue to be involved in everything and that they gotten so far ahead of this game than all these other companies in terms of what they do and how they do it. That conviction has been rewarded. Palantir is up 90 year to date. It was up last year too. It's one of my best performing stocks over the last few years. And God bless. The other two stocks that invested in with some conviction were Amazon and Microsoft. A few years back with the concept again that both of them were sort of doubling down and making money in the cloud business. You know, AWS and Azure at Amazon and Microsoft, the two of them. And in the concept here, where I feel like I got this more right than wrong is I actually invested with some conviction versus on a whim and thought about deeply, went through it deeply, made a decision, made an assessment, and it makes you much more willing to hold those stocks through ups and downs and, and it makes you a much better investor when you actually invest in conviction. So the lesson I've learned over the years is when I don't invest with conviction, it's a disaster. When I invest with some thoughts about why I'm doing something, it is typically a much better plan and a much better, you know, much better outcome in the long run. So those are the two thoughts for the day. Invest it with conviction here. I'm talking about investing with Palantir, Microsoft and Amazon, and thrilled with those, but also have made plenty and plenty of errors, particularly when invested without conviction. And that's been across the board in lots of different places. Thank you for listening to the Becker Private Equity Podcast and the Becker Business Podcast. Thank you very, very.
