Slope of Hope Blog Posts

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One Nuclear Bomb Can Ruin Your Whole Day

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Well, today would have been a pretty good day for me, were it not for one (out of about seventy…) positions. Its name is GSIC, and if it were a person, I'd be strangling it right now.

The company was taken over by eBay, bless their hearts, at a 50% premium. This means that I didn't even have a chance; I was forced out of the position at a nasty loss. This is a bear's worst nightmare.

0328-gsic

There are a couple of bits of good news is this disgusting scenario: 

(1) As always, I spread my positions very thin on individual securities. It represented about half of a single percentage point of my portfolio. So a 50% loss sucks, no doubt about it, but watering it down by that much takes a lot of the pain away.

(2) I ask myself, was it bad analysis or bad luck? I can honestly say it was bad luck. There's nothing in the chart that should have warned me about this, and I simply got unlucky. The way to manage luck, in my opinion, is to spread risk (see point (1)).

Anyway, I was delighted that the market's strength fade away today, but GSIC took that delicious piece of cheesecake served to me today and dropped a stinking dog turd on top of it.