That investment was a huge failure!

Thank you for always reading my posts.
This is Keisuke.

This time, I’ll tell a somewhat embarrassing story.

If you’ve been investing for a long time, you can selectively highlight the stories that went well.
But in reality, there are many times when things go wrong behind the scenes.

In fact, that may be more common.

Today, one of those stories.
It’s a failure I still remember clearly today.

◆ The story of losing one-third of my assets with Nvidia

Early 2021.
The global stock market, sparked by the Russia-Ukraine war, became suddenly unstable.

Markets were dropping almost daily.
There wasn’t much good news either.

During such times, I was strongly drawn to a certain stock.

The American semiconductor company Nvidia.

Even then, I had a conviction close to certainty that this company would eventually dominate the market.
Looking back now, that might have been more a wish than certainty.

In hindsight, it wasn’t certainty so much as a wish.

When the stock price began to fall, I thought it was a bargain.

Rather, the more it fell,
“This is the time to accumulate.”
That’s what I believed.

And before I knew it,
I had invested almost all my funds.

Looking at it calmly, it was quite reckless.

I hadn’t even set a stop-loss line.
The expected value was based only on my own beliefs.

I held on with the belief that “it will rise someday.”

As a matter of course, the stock price didn’t bounce back quickly.
Instead, it continued to slide bit by bit every day.

The hardest part isn’t the steep drop.
Little by little, it was eroded away steadily.
Every day, the value of my holdings decreased.

Before I realized it, that was all I could think about every day.

“It should stop here.”
“It should rebound soon.”

I carried those hopes many times.
But it didn’t stop.

At that point, my stomach started to churn (laugh).

And one day,
I hit my limit and dumped everything at once.

As a result, I lost about one-third of my assets.

So what happened afterward,
I became afraid to touch individual stocks.

I couldn’t trade as I used to.
Whenever it dropped even a little, that memory came back.

In the end, for nearly a year I did almost nothing out of fear.

Looking back now, what I learned from this failure is simple.

“If you hold without setting rules, people will inevitably be destroyed by emotions.”

So now,

• A clear reason to buy

• Setting a stop-loss level

I always decide on these two things.

By the way, the Nvidia profits story I wrote about before comes from later than this.

◆ Summary

Investing isn’t a neat accumulation of successful outcomes.

Rather, it’s about how you recover after being hurt.
And how you navigate not to get hurt again.

I think this is more important.

It was an awkward story, but
I think it’s okay to share these kinds of stories occasionally.