True @Strawman however the doing nothing clearly refers specifically to their investments. Since I retired from paid work at the hommus factory here in Adelaide in April 2024, I have never been busier. I am certainly never bored. But most of that time is not being spent on my investments (or blogging) - a great deal of it is being spent with my family, gardening, reading, and other non-investing activities.

I do tend to occasionally spend intensive periods of time doing research on companies that I am interested in buying shares in, their competitors, etc, and further research on the ones I already hold to make sure I haven't missed anything and that my investment thesis for each of my holdings still holds up, but that's mostly the set-up investment, in terms of time spent. The ongoing time invested in staying abreast of developments is far lower, and obviously my biggest gainers have been in companies where I haven't tinkered with them too much and just let them do their thing over a number of years.

Best example of how tinkering can damage returns for me recently is Genesis Minerals (GMD) which I've only held for two and a half years, but that's still years (with an "s"). Back in July 2023, St Barbara (SBM), which I held at the time, completed the in-specie distribution of Genesis Minerals (GMD) shares to its shareholders as part of their Leonora asset sale, with the shares valued for tax purposes at $1.21 per share (1 GMD share for every 4 St Barbara shares held). That gave me my first 3,760 GMD shares. I then added another 16,240 GMD shares to my SMSF in Jan (@ $1.56) and Feb 2024 (@ $1.62) for a total investment of $30,000 (for 20,000 GMD shares). I sold 12,000 of those last year, so I now hold 8,000 GMD shares, priced on Friday (at the close) @ $7.86 per share, so my SMSF position is 8,000 GMD with a market value of $62,880.00. If I hadn't sold those 12,000 GMD shares last year, @ $3.26 and $5.01, I'd now be holding 20,000 GMD worth $157,200 (@ $7.86 each). In relation to GMD last year, I should have been doing nothing, rather than worrying about the risks and trimming the position.

It's still one of my best performing companies in the past couple of years, but my returns could have been much higher if I'd just done nothing in 2025.

Other times, that theory can backfire, as with Audinate (AD8) which I first bought in my SMSF in July 2023 @ $8.99.

That seemed like a genius move to me (although far more luck than skill was involved clearly) as they immediately started rising and peaked at over $23 in March 2024 (AD8 closed at $23.31 on 11-March-2024), being more than 2.5 x my $8.99 buy price. And then that uptrend turned on a dime and they started a downtrend that was even steeper than their uptrend had been.

I added more in early October 2024 @ $9.72, as shown above, thinking they were back at the start of an uptrend again, and then they got sold down again immediately afterwards, so I sold out completely at $8.90 two weeks later, because it became very clear to me that I did not understand this company and their timeline to profitability enough to have so much of my investable capital tied up in them.

So I booked a loss, but not a huge one.

However what I did with AD8 last year was my biggest series of mistakes of 2025 - I turned that small loss into a much bigger one, in fact a $35,000 capital loss altogether for AD8 in 2025.

I decided that the market just didn't understand the massive opportunity that AD8 had in audio in their particular niche area, so I embarked on a series of buys that I considered value investing via dollar-cost-averaging:

• 17 Feb 2025: Buy: 4,000 AD8 @ $9.979 ($39,950)
• 3 Mar 2025: Buy: 2,000 AD8 @ $8.51 ($17,000)
• 10 Mar 2025: Buy : 1,877 AD8 @ $7.569 ($14,200)
• 12 Mar 2025: Buy: 247 AD8 @ $6.819 ($1,700)
• 28 Apr 2025: Buy: 1,707 AD8 @ $6.27 ($10,700)
• 5 May 2025: Buy: 319 AD8 @ $6.05 ($1,900)

So I just kept buying all the way down to $6, and then I paused for three months. Audinate had again, briefly in March 2025, become the largest position in my SMSF. The first time was in March 2024 when they were over $23/share and I was up by 2.5 times, but I did not sell any. This time I had sunk much more capital into the company but the share price had not stopped drifting south, so I was well underwater.

On 18 Aug 2025 I sold all 10,150 AD8 shares I held in my SMSF at $5.00 each for $50,700. They weren't the largest position in my SMSF at that point, but they would have been based on my capital invested. I did that because it became clear to me that my investment thesis (IT) was totally busted. In short my IT for AD8 was based on their audio dominance and their TAM for that, however I had not anticipated how much time and money their management was going to invest into the other two divisions of the company, video and control. So it became clear to me that the waters here were much muddier than I had anticipated and the path to increasing profitability was now very unknown and very hard to estimate because I had no idea how much money AD8 were going to spend in the next few years on chasing market share in video and control, both areas where they did NOT dominate (as they did in stadium/large venue digital audio). A company can have a very profitable segment/division, but if they are ploughing those profits back into segments that are still loss-making for them, then that changes the thesis a LOT. So, for the second time, I put AD8 into the "too hard" basket and stepped to the sidelines.

They closed on Friday at $4.60, so I would have achieved even greater capital losses by "doing nothing" in their case. Of course Audinate could be trading a lot higher in future years, sure, but I'm much happier investing in companies where I have a much better understanding of how they earn their money and what their management are likely to do based on their track record to date.

So, sure, most investments benefit greatly from a "do nothing" approach once you're set (have bought your desired allocation of shares), however, not all investments.

Great point @Bear77. You're dead right of course.

It's maybe better phased as "good investors are really good at waiting"

Yes @Strawman that works. I should have mentioned in my earlier post that what I did with Audinate last year (averaging down and then selling out even lower) was one of the many valuable lessons that @Solvetheriddle shared here during his chat with you on the 19th of this month (check it out on the "Meetings" page if you haven't watched it yet people - it's very good!) concerning losing money through thinking you know why a company's share price is falling and buying it (or buying more of it) and being dead wrong about why the share price is falling. It doesn't fit in with his twin scenarios of the profits are rising and the share price is falling, or the profits are falling and so is the share price, because Audinate were not profitable during 2025 due to their investments into video and control, however the lesson remains: Some of our biggest losses are because we think we know why a share price is falling, and we think the market has got it wrong, but we are actually the ones who are wrong. Yep, can't argue with that.

The market isn't always wrong. Emotional? Sure. Irrational? Yes, at times. Petulant and over-the-top dramatic (over-reacting), absolutely, but not all the time. If a share price keeps falling and I think there's nothing wrong with the company or their outlook, I often haven't looked hard enough.

@Bear77 , thanks so much for these honest and detailed couple of examples. I think it really illustrates well what a lot of us commonly experience with stocks. Often it feels like whichever way you go you get it wrong. You would have thought the lesson from GMD would have been to hold on, but then 'the correct' decision for GMD that you then applied to AD8 goes the absolute opposite way.

I don't have any additional insight here, just acknowledging it is a great example of something I have experienced time and again while investing, and I struggle with endlessly when deciding whether to 'take profit'. With real speculators I tend to take out my initial investment plus a small percentage and then let it run if I'm lucky enough to see a 100% plus gain. I also have had some where situations where I 'hedge' take profit on 1/2 the investment and let the other half run. With a stock like FFM I have taken profit several times on the way up and it has mostly kept running so I have some regrets there.

With speculators I will often set a sell target, for example over 30% profit I sell, but then it hurts when they go many times further than that like SRL has done lately. It hurts worse though when I don't stick to the decision, because I like the company, and then it tanks like FBR did.

I reckon there'd be a lot of 'do nothing' investors that are feeling a lot of pain at the moment with things like TWE, CSL, XRO and a bunch of other 'market darlings'.

Yep. It is actually the other way around - the market is often right, and bouts of irrationality tend to be short-lived unless there is broader speculative fervour about an industry or sector.

Adding this @Lewis

Related, a very nerdy video review of an academic paper on being 100% invested in stocks (even in retirement), as opposed to a 60/40 stocks/bonds portfolio or a target date fund.

https://youtu.be/-nPon8Ad_Ug?si=C72Dd_ZTxaSACi18

It is very dry, but is almost worth wading through for 2 pithy quips towards the end.

I'll only say, beware of your bias here, as I suspect this is very much preaching to the already converted

Spot on @Strawman!

@Lewis , yes, all makes sense; however, I suspect it is a large leap of faith for new investors who haven't seen it play out in their own experiences. one big issue is that there is a large element of randomness in investing, outcomes that blur the picture, eg outrageous risk takers and "know nothings" stumbling into large returns, investing is not a neat scientific process where rational actions and discipline always win, especially over the ST/MT. it is the realisation and acceptance that occurs (try not to panic, lose focus or get angry about it) and blocking out unhelpful noise and chatter (there is a lot of that lol) that helps me. use whatever works

Too right. To me it feels like the more you can suppress natural human instincts (going with the crowd, panic when you lose, elation when you win, immediate satisfaction, recency bias etc), the better an investor you become.

I find myself switching semi-regularly from good rational mindset investor to irrational human nature investor, which is why I really value regular reminders from threads like this.

I also find I get back on track after re-reading the classic investing books which talk about process and patience, and even books like Thinking Fast and Slow to remind me how fallible our puny brains can be.