Hi, my name is Christian.

I started investing in the stock market during the 2008 market crash. It was a wild time to start looking at stocks. Blue-chip companies were going to zero, 100-year-old brands were trading at hugely depressed levels.

It’s easy to sit here in 2023 and know that everything would work out, but at the time, it was very unclear what would happen next.

As it turns out, after a few speed bumps, the stock market would proceed to have an epic bull run, largely fueled by zero interest money, massive fiscal spending, and tax cuts.

Because of the time that I experienced stocks, my perspective might be skewed, but I wanted to share my two biggest mistakes. Maybe someone will read this and avoid the same blunder.

Hopefully, my suggestions are a bit contrary to what you might hear elsewhere. There are so many mistakes to make in equities; hopefully, these are somewhat original.

Selling individual stocks after deciding they’re good companies: if you’re under 60, ideally you’re on at a minimum ten-year investment horizon. I did a decent amount of research before buying a stock. By decent, I mean that I had formed a thesis for why I thought a business might do well over time. My framework generally fit a five-year window. I never bought anything for a short-term goal.

In general, this worked really well. I bought companies like Apple, Netflix, Facebook, and others at what would now be considered low prices.

And then, after seeing good returns, I’d sell them! Makes sense, right? Optimize for returns and put that money somewhere else once your thesis has worked out.

What I failed to understand was that winners tend to compound over time, and the potential upside of a winning business usually outweighs the benefit of locking returns or putting your money elsewhere. Picking the winners is the goal. Once you’ve done that, let them ride.

Trying to time and mitigate market cycles. The stock market gyrates. You cannot expect long-term average returns of 7-8% without volatility. That said, you can usually see when things are overheating. Right before the Trump Tax Cuts, P/E ratios in the stock market were looking very high. I was starting to think that we were in for a correction, so I moved a good amount of my portfolio into low-volatility ETFs and other “safer” equities, which would offer lower returns but fare better in a down cycle.

The first thing that happened was we cut the corporate tax rate, which improved corporate earnings and deflated the P/E ratio of the market (DOH!). Then we had COVID, the fiscal response, and the completely insane bubble of 2020/2021.

When the correction finally hit in 2022, it’s true that I outperformed the market, but I also partially missed four years’ of upside. There is no question that I would have been better off doing nothing and letting the market work itself out.

In summary, let your winners ride, and don’t try avoiding the inevitable pain that market cycles bring by timing the correction.