Reflections on missed opportunities

The following write-up reflects only the authors opinions and should not be taken as investment advice. The author may own, buy and sell securities mentioned in this post.

I think growth investing is a constant struggle to try and make as high as a return as possible as long as the favorable trends for growth investing last (low rates, low GDP growth). That’s why it’s important to me to identify and hopefully participate in the best performing companies. In this post I will reflect on stocks that I have missed out on, that I shouldn’t have missed out on, and why I did so. Hopefully it will be a learning experience.

$MNDY - Monday.com (And Asana)

155->342 in just a little over two months.

This one hurts to have missed out on, a 120% return in such a short period is something to die for. I initially decided to pass on this one because of personal biases against applications with little moats, as perceived by me personally. With so many competing project management tools that all claim to be able to do it all, it was difficult for me to gain conviction in both Monday.com and Asana without having extensive hands on experience with the tools, or deep knowledge of the industry.

$AMD - Advanced Micro Devices

I was heavily long AMD but decided to put all my chips on Nvidia instead because of personal biases. This turned out to be a mistake, as AMD was clearly undervalued relative to Nvidia. AMD has benefited from the same taiwinds as nvidia has, with their entire inventory of GPU’s being sold out for most of the quarter.

$DDOG - Datadog

Datadog is a stock I had been long for a while, but given the challenging competitive environment in the sector, with good companies all competing with each other ($DT $SUMO $SPLK $ESTC and others) I decided to sell my shares at around $96 months ago. This turned out to be a mistake I can only ascribe to the fact that Datadog has an excellent sales team which is good at selling their product. Something that’s difficult to truly get an insight in as a retail investor.

$GOOG - Google

Last but not least there’s Google. I have no good explanation for missing out on this one except that I was too greedy to own a large cap, and I didn’t think it was remotely possible for such a big company to rally so much in such a short period of time.

To finish I want to congratulate anyone that participated in any of these great stories.