There's a great Howard Marks podcast about this, more winners or fewer losers. It's on his The Memo podcast from Sept 2023. He uses the analogy of a tennis player who just keeps getting it over the net and in court beating the player who hits some big winners but also a lot of misses.

Congrats though @GazD for getting back in the black.

Also a good lesson on sequencing risk - i had the same and perhaps didn’t pay attention to the straw portfolio due to study in the early days.

Your not on your lonesome @GazD. I think many like me have been in a similar position with my portfolio only reaching the original 100k (0.0% return) in Sept 2024 after commencing at a similar time to you. It's kicked on a bit since then with a little more focus, patience on some long-term positions and as always, a big splash of luck ($TRS getting a huge buyout offer from Dollarama). You're heading in the right direction and on track, keep up the good effort!!

Congratulations @GazD … you’re an inspiration to us losers!

You're not alone in that experience @GazD

Just as I was starting to believe I was the next Stanley Druckenmiller, my SM portfolio dropped 50% from when we started Premium, only passing back above the high-water mark earlier this year. My real-life portfolio wasn’t much different..

The peak of the small-cap market in 2021, and the subsequent sell-off, caught a lot of us. The SM index from that point (which is when Premium began) is likewise only now back to break-even.

The truth is, this is perfectly normal. Even the strongest-performing assets go through periods of drawdown and underperformance.

Bitcoin is a case in point. One of the best-performing assets in history, yet if you bought in late 2017 or 2021, you suffered a crushing drawdown and had to wait three years to break even. And yet, had you bought at each of those peaks, you’d still be up roughly 8x and 2x today.

You can find similar stories for shareholders in Amazon, Nvidia, and plenty of others.

My takeaway is that if your process is sound (even if it always needs refining), such periods are temporary. In fact, I’d argue persistence is one of the biggest determinants of success in investing. Most people give up after their first serious dip, convinced the market is too risky and only for speculators.

Ironically, those periods are often the best buying opportunities. I always liked how Morgan Housel framed a crash as something we see as a risk when we look ahead, but as an opportunity when we look back.

Many here are proof of that. The better returns in recent times came from those who saw the pullback as a chance to buy, and it’s been an incredible run. Fortune favours the brave!

Of course, we’ll see similar cycles in the future. And it’s usually when you feel invincible that the universe serves up a big slice of humble pie..

All I know is that a sound process and a long time frame make a potent combination.

Keep going!

@GazD I dream of getting back to zero on my SM portfolio, well done. Also great recovery @lowway , inspirational.

I will add being down 66% requires a 200% gain to recover back to zero... like you, thankfully my RL portfolio is very different and the timing of the start of my SM portfolio for the type of investment was about as bad as it gets, added to a neglect of the SM portfolio up to a bit over a year ago when my RL portfolio and RL in general held my focus.

In then end it's about not giving up, learning from mistakes and trying to keep a long term focus, even when the short term pain is intense!