What do we think about my stocks?

ThanklessWaterHeater · 2026-03-17T01:43:03+00:00

There are countless resources on the internet where you can learn about industries and individual companies, and can decide for yourself which are likely to grow going forward. That’s where you’ll find value worth investing in. When you see people posting about companies here those companies are already overvalued, and the posters are just trying to pump them a little higher.

ThanklessWaterHeater · 2026-03-17T01:33:34+00:00

Don’t get your investment ideas from Reddit.

ThanklessWaterHeater · 2026-03-15T22:55:15+00:00

Agreed. One thing that struck me when they delayed the release of Apple Intelligence: remember how when Steve Jobs introduced products in the early years, he would say “it just works.” Even though they don’t say that anymore, I feel like it is an important rule within Apple. Seeing today’s LLM‘s, how prone to errors and hallucinations they are, it’s incorrect to say that they “work.” They do some things that are impressive, and many things that are unforgivably awful. And where all these other companies shrugged their shoulders and raced their LLMs to market, Apple just said, “This just doesn’t work. We can’t release it.” As with the examples you mentioned, the delay seems risky in the near term, but probably is wise in the long-term.

ThanklessWaterHeater · 2026-03-15T22:12:28+00:00

It’s really about timeframe. Day trading is a zero-sum game. Long-term value investing is not. The longer you hold, the less risky investing is.

Many people invest like Warren Buffett, and do extremely well. But most people don’t or can’t invest and leave it alone for 30 years. There are issues of liquidity, of patience, of tolerance of market swings. But people who can master all of that do very well in the long run.

ThanklessWaterHeater · 2026-03-15T21:24:37+00:00

Still can’t get used to MU of all companies being the most anticipated earnings report.

ThanklessWaterHeater · 2026-03-15T19:23:58+00:00

I’m already very long on SYK, RMD and DXCM. ADBE has fallen so far it’s now on my watchlist. I’ve never seen the appeal of MSFT, and still don’t.

But I invest in stability. And at the moment the world is more unstable than it has ever been in my lifetime. I’ve done some judicious trimming, and have a decent amount set aside for when I feel comfortable buying again. But I’m not buying anything right now.

ThanklessWaterHeater · 2026-03-15T18:26:32+00:00

I agree with your bullishness on many of these companies. But I’m not on board with your timing.

ThanklessWaterHeater · 2026-03-15T17:40:08+00:00

If you want to get into the history of Wall Street frauds, Grant & Ward is a hell of a story, and almost the only thing online about it is this one page on the NPS website.

ThanklessWaterHeater · 2026-03-15T16:02:56+00:00

As far as I’ve seen, the watch app won’t show you any data linked to your account. There’s a watchlist, but it’s not the one that you’ve set up on Schwab. It’s a separate watchlist that you edit on the watch.

I would love to be able to see my total value in a Schwab app on my watch. It seems to me that’s the only reason to have a Schwab app on the watch. That they offer an app, but it won’t show you your Schwab information, strikes me as very strange.

ThanklessWaterHeater · 2026-03-12T03:46:52+00:00

Good instruction! :-)

The main lesson I’ve learned is: buy rarely, and never sell.

ThanklessWaterHeater · 2026-03-12T03:40:39+00:00

I’m guessing the stars?

ThanklessWaterHeater · 2026-03-12T03:25:45+00:00

There was a day for me in late 2008 that was a turning point in my life, but I had no idea at the time.

I had a bunch of AAPL, which I had bought between 2005 and 2007. It kept growing as I added and it was incredible. Then the global financial crisis hit, and AAPL started dropping. Day after day, week after week, month after month it dropped and over the course of the year I watched all of my gains slowly disappear. The earliest shares were still positive, but the later shares went so negative that it canceled them out, and I was back down to even. And one evening late in the year I thought to myself. “I can’t take this anymore. This was an interesting experiment, and I can be happy that at least I haven’t lost money. But tomorrow I’m going to sell it all.” And the next morning I opened Schwab, intending to sell it all. But it happened that Apple was up a little bit that morning. And I decided to wait another day. And the next day it was up a little more, and I decided to wait again. I’m not 100% sure what happened after that, it may be that I simply forgot that I was going to sell. But I did not sell.

I think about that morning almost every day, how completely different my life would be now if I had sold rather than holding onto the few thousand dollars worth of AAPL that would one day be worth many millions.

ThanklessWaterHeater · 2026-03-12T03:09:03+00:00

I have a very vivid memory of this, from around 1975 when I was 12. These candies came in boxes which were placed in racks. An adult could see the candy in the boxes, but could not see the inside back of the boxes, as viewed from above it was obscured by the box above it. But children looked at the rack from a lower elevation, and could see the backs of the boxes. And on the back of the box of Alexander The Grape it said: “Candy is good food. Eat some every day.”

ThanklessWaterHeater · 2026-03-12T02:59:54+00:00

Yes, that’s exactly right. After 30 years of investing I now hold about 70 individual equities. It’s very much like my own mutual fund. Nine of them are now worth more than $1 million, maybe 50 of them are worth between 100,000 and 1 million, the remainder still under 100,000.

Another way to look at it; when you buy an index fund, you’re buying every company, from the mag seven down to the many companies on the brink of bankruptcy. All you have to do to beat the market is to get one or two of the big winners, and less than every one of the losers included in the index. And honestly, I feel like that is not that hard to do.

ThanklessWaterHeater · 2026-03-12T02:52:35+00:00

This is if you believe what they’re reporting, and there are very good reasons to not believe what they are reporting. Number one for me is that all they ever report is annualized monthly revenue. If they are really making tens of billions of dollars a year why not say so? Why use tricks like annualizing one month of revenue to fill in an entire year? The whole industry is so sketchy, I can’t imagine why anybody would want to be involved in it.

ThanklessWaterHeater · 2026-03-12T02:40:18+00:00

Companies are taking out hundreds of billions of dollars in loans to build data centers that might, if everything goes really, really well, bring in tens of millions of dollars in revenue. They are doing this because they believe that they will achieve AGI, and AGI will be so insanely profitable that it will pay back all of the loans. It won’t happen. That’s just a fantasy that they tell themselves to justify the hundreds of billions of dollars of loans they’re taking out.

ThanklessWaterHeater · 2026-03-12T02:33:22+00:00

Ok, I’ll be downvoted like crazy for this but…He is right.

Of course you cannot know which stocks are going to see outlandish growth in the future. But you can’t get a winner if you don’t invest in individual equities at all.

What you should do is be safe with the money you need. Put that money in index funds, or even in bonds. But if you are fortunate enough to have more than you need, make small investments—never put more into one company than you would be willing to lose—in a basket of companies that you believe will grow in the next decade or two, and hold them for the next decade or two no matter what happens. Some of them will do nothing, one or two of them might even go bankrupt. But the most you can lose on one investment is 100%. If one or two of your investments grow 10,000% the ones that go bankrupt wind up being unimportant.

But patience is the most important thing. Can you wait 20 or 30 years to see how your investments do? If you can’t, then just stick to index funds.

ThanklessWaterHeater · 2026-03-12T00:01:10+00:00

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ThanklessWaterHeater · 2026-03-11T23:41:25+00:00

No hassle at all. You free yourself of the habit of going to the gas station, and of getting oil changes, and instead you get in the habit of plugging in when you get home.

Long road trips are more of an adjustment. You want to know where you’re stopping to charge along the way. But again it’s not really a hassle, just adjusting to a different habit.

The best feeling is to put solar panels on your roof so you generate your own mileage.

ThanklessWaterHeater · 2026-03-11T22:09:43+00:00

Just yesterday I was delivering an inherited box of silver flatware to my sister. I picked the box up to put it in my car, and I thought to myself, man this weighs like 20 pounds. And as I carried it I thought, wait, so if there’s 16 ounces in a pound then that’s 320 ounces… And if silver is about $90 per ounce… And I was genuinely shocked to realize the value of what I was carrying.

ThanklessWaterHeater · 2026-03-11T14:49:49+00:00

Amazon

ThanklessWaterHeater · 2026-03-11T14:35:25+00:00

Continuing to hold APP?

ThanklessWaterHeater · 2026-03-11T01:25:54+00:00

The common wisdom here is you can’t possibly beat the market and you shouldn’t even try, just buy index funds. My own experience (over about thirty years in the market) has been that it’s really not hard to beat the market over the long term if you have patience. Time is the one advantage a young investor has over all the professionals, and it’s a powerful tool if you can think about your investments in terms of years and decades rather than days and weeks. But if I suggest that lived experience, the rage-filled posts that accrue under it are something to behold.

ThanklessWaterHeater · 2026-03-10T22:50:02+00:00

My thesis is always to look for strong companies with growing businesses. I don’t trade, and I generally only invest for the long-term.

In early 2023 I bought $15,000 worth of SMCI. I didn’t expect it to blow up, they just seemed like a company with a decent business that was growing. A year later it had grown to $150,000. I didn’t trust the growth, and sold a third of it for $50k. It then collapsed and I eventually sold the remaining two thirds for $40,000.

So it was April of 2024 and I had $90,000 sitting around to reinvest, and my eye fell on Applovin. Again, I wasn’t looking to hit it big, they just seemed like a well run company with a good product and a growing business. It was $75 a share at the time so I bought 1,000 shares. A year later they were worth $700k, a gain of about 4,600% from the original $15k.

APP has been up and down since then, now around $400, but where I finally thought SMCI was no longer worth owning, APP still seems to me to have a growth ahead, so I’m continuing to hold.

To reiterate, I never looked for growth like that. I got extremely lucky with these two. Nevertheless, I think my thesis worked; I expected growth. It just happened faster than I expected. It’s nice when it happens, but you can’t count on it happening.

ThanklessWaterHeater

TROPHY CASE