The first rule of money management is never to have to say you are sorry. That’s why money managers never tell you in real time what their holdings are. It’s why they don’t hold monthly meetings. It’s why they don’t take questions. To which I say this: We run a club. We are open about what we do. How can you learn if you can’t even admit your mistakes? With our “Monthly Meeting” for December now in the books, here’s a look at how we misstepped in 2022 — and what we learned along the way. What we learned 1. Market cap matters. Some of our best stocks got out of hand. At one point Nvidia (NVDA), a very good company, was worth more than $820 billion, or more than 29 times sales. It didn’t matter that Nvidia is one of the finest, most innovative companies around. Just like there is a buy price for pretty much everything there is a sell price, too. When you have a very high price-to-sales ratio, you must ask yourself if there’s too much enthusiasm and not enough that can still take it higher? You must scrutinize whether the company has something up its sleeve in the next 12 months, not the next 12 years, that backs up the premium. If you’re creating answers to justify a valuation that has become unjustifiable, then you have to exit the position — as we should have done with Nvidia. 2. It’s key that a company be communicative with shareholders. Or does it dodge you and treat you unfairly? That’s been our experience with Bausch Health (BHC). No matter what we do they will not talk to us. They will not call us back. They won’t validate the thesis they laid out on “Mad Money.” So we are frozen, we don’t know what to do. This belligerence is unacceptable and puts us in limbo, a terrible place to be. 3. Don’t fall for the grand tour, or the grand lunch for that matter. You have no idea how many executives I go out with each week. Of course, each has a good story. Same with the executives who come on “Mad Money.” It’s always sunny. That’s why meeting with an executive can be fatal. CEOs are salespeople for their institution. They are incredibly effective. You have to be skeptical and resist the sirens. 4. Beware of stories based on the total addressable market size. You can get all bulled up for nothing. So often a company says an opportunity is so huge you have to get in on it. I didn’t fall into this trap with SmileDirectClub (SDC), the braces company, which told us that the worldwide total demand for its products was $500 billion. That may have been true when the stock was at $15 a share two years ago. But it also may be true at 53 cents a share, where it is now. Remember these more pertinent words: show me the money. 5. Don’t fight the Federal Reserve. No matter how rock solid your story might be, no matter how much the earnings could ramp up, if the Fed is trying to knock down inflation, it will knock down your stock, too. A hawkish Fed is your enemy. When we forgot this, we lost a lot of money. In a bear market, capital preservation trumps…
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