All right, before I was going to do an accurate calculation of the annual return of my portfolio, all my year 2007 gain (realized and unrealized) are gone by yesterday market close.
Blame the market? Blame the CEO of Crocs and Longtop? Blame Jim Cramer? Blame the Fed (as Jim Cramer did in his show)? Or I should simply blame myself? I should have expected some of these coming: Crocs has been under pressure since last Q; and Longtop has not done well ever since its IPO pop. Keep in mind LFT is not as high profile as the NetSuite, the software as service IPO in the silicon valley. After all, it was my own decision to get into those mess 🙂
My pain did not come just from loss, I can think of couple reasons that aggreviate my pain:
1) The “potential gain” from Crocs all vaporized. As Charlie Munger once said (point 11: removal of something almost possessed, but never possessed): if one tries to pull a meat already in a dog’s mouth, the dog will not be unhappier (vs. not getting the meat at first place).
2) A sense of no progress: I was thinking I have made some progress in past few years regarding investing, by reading up and do my own investing (or speculating), but obviously I am not what I wanted to be. I am making same mistakes. Again and again.
As I was doing more reading on Buffett’s annual shareholder letter, I was thinking: has Buffett ever in a situation like me? I mean bought some stocks then under water for a while? Maybe. But I suspect he sold the losers quickly, and his winners far outweighs losers.
I received the CFA books yesterday. Hopefully I will get better as I learn (from the book and practice). It looks like today Mr. market improved a bit for me, let’see.