As a consumer of financial news, youve probably seen stories with headlines like…
Heres How Much Money Youd Have If You Invested $1,000 in the IPO of [insert hugely successful company name here]
Heres How Much Money Youd Have If You Invested $1,000 in Apple When Steve Jobs Launched the iPhone
If You Invested in Disney 10 Years Ago, Heres How Much Youd Have Now
Its a kind of parlor game. Pretty much every major financial news outlet does some variation on this theme.
Its like looking at multimillion-dollar homes on Sothebys. Some people call this real estate porn.
But like the feeling of inadequacy you can get looking at real estate way out of your price range, theres a downside too.
Obviously, these stories are the epitome of 20-20 hindsight.
More importantly, they make investing look easy. And its not. Even investing in the best-performing stocks isnt easy. Most times, it takes a lot of intestinal fortitude to stick with these high-power stocks through thick and thin.
Consider the following:
In other words, many investors had the wisdom to buy Amazon – but holding on through its dramatic ups and downs was another story.
There were even calls for founder Reed Hastings to step down. Hastings eventually relented, reversed the strategy and kept his job.
The rest is bull market history… but do you think it was easy for shareholders to ride out that storm?
Even during its amazing run since the iPhone launched, Apple stock has fallen more than 30% from its peak at least seven times.
This includes drawdowns of more than 80% between 2001 and 2003, and 58% in 2008.
Keeping Great Stocks… in Sickness and in Health
I could tell a similar story for pretty much any great long-term stock holding.
Its estimated that Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) has created as many as 10,000 millionaires. The stock has been on fire lately, but Mr. Softee was pretty much dead money (at best) from 2000 to 2014.
Pretty much every great investment has had its major bad patches. Even Warren Buffetts Berkshire Hathaway (NYSE: BRK.A) has had three drawdowns of at least 50% in its glorious history.
The first one struck in the early 1970s. Then, in 1999, Buffett was viewed as being out of touch for not investing in tech stocks. Finally, the stock plummeted again during the financial crisis of 2007 to 2009.
So yes, you can make fantastic sums of money being an early investor in tomorrows giants.
But what the mainstream media fails to tell you is that you need a really strong stomach – and some powerful stock market intel – to find the pot of gold on the other side of the rainbow.
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