Sold mid last year at $12.50 IRL because I thought the business model was broken. The problem was I realised this a lot later than I should have unfortunately. One of my worst ever investments and took around a 50% loss. Just shows how important it is not to hold on for the sake of it or because it’s already down so far. After making several bad decisions to continue holding on the way down, at least I eventually make a good one!

I agree with you about Appen @Alpha18 and I was warning about them last year, however human behaviour dictates that we will often be selective with what facts we attach the most weight to due to confirmation bias, and other biases that seem to inhibit our ability to step back and look at every investment completely logically and without emotion or bias, and particularly with those investments where we already have sunk capital. I was guilty of this with Zoono. Held on for far too long and sold out finally on 1st Feb this year after reading their latest quarterly report (released late on the 31st Jan). I was convinced they were oversold all the way down, but I was wrong. They are a terrible company and I shouldn't have invested in them. Well, I can forgive myself for investing in them, but I should have sold out a LOT sooner than I did. They looked good when I first invested in them, they were profitable and had just declared a 3 cps dividend, and Covid-19 should have given them a brilliant tailwind, but over subsequent reports they proved to have incompetent and inept management and their products were clearly not gaining the traction in the market that their spin would have us believe. Every positive metric declined into negative territory, they are now loss-making with declining revenue and higher and higher costs, particularly legal costs and consultancy fees. It was easy to read and believe their reports that this was all temporary setbacks in what would eventually prove to be a wonderful business. However the gap between the spin and the actual numbers just widened and widened. In their December Quarter report (released late on 31-Mar-2022) they actually seemed to be giving up on the positive spin, as there was a lot less of it and I realised their report for H1 of FY22 was going to be a shocker so I sold the lot. The realised loss was bigger than it needed to be. I gave them too much rope and my investment thesis was not tight enough. In hindsight there was significant thesis creep there and it won't happen again. I sold out at 28 cps in IRL and they are now 22.5 cps. APX's share price graph tells a similar story. I think there was finally that "capitulation" yesterday, with that -28.7% fall, and while they have bounced by around +9.8% today, I consider it a dead-cat-bounce. They are looking more and more like a basket case. A value trap. Something to steer well clear of, like Zoono.

I disagree topline still grew. Orders in hand higher than last year and new markets growing at 20%+

Producing significant free cashflow and well capitalised with cash in the bank and no debt.

The market will do what it wants.

Don't really think this has any similarity with zoono...

Brilliant post @Dominator - I learnt a lot there. Many of those are lessons that we hear in podcasts and articles etc. all the time but rarely using such a specific example. It's not a stock that I've owned but I can certainly apply those moments you describe to other investments I have owned and have similarly lost money in unnecessarily. Well done for documenting it and in particular for documenting it here.

Thanks Noddy, glad you liked the post. Good point about podcasts/articles/books, you hear/see all these different sayings, in isolation they make complete sense but it is always more nuanced than that, no hard and fast rules/concepts actually work. The only way to learn this is time in the market to develop your strategies that can minimise your chances of loss and maximise gains. All I can say is I've been doing a lot of learning and still have a long way to go!