A little thank you to Warren Buffet

[Rain Man]

Originally Posted by Amnorix

Why leave the $1,200 at risk chasing the last few pennies on the spread between the current price and the purchase price? If the deal tanks for any reason at all, your $1,200 is going to evaporate fast.

The only guys left in the game at this point should be the arbitrageurs. You're basically betting $1,200 to make, what? About a buck? Current stock price is $72.49 and Buffet's purchase price is $72.50 and you own like 80 shares if my math adds up.

If you have to pay separate transaction costs for each sale then you're really being silly.

IMHO, next time, take the money and run Lebowski.


EDIT: Sorry, don't mean to be Debbie Downer -- congrats! It's certainly a very sweet moment of victory.

I'm going to explain, and you'll likely laugh at me.

In 1991 and 1992, I bought Dell stock twice when it was a very young company. I was living in Austin at the time, and it wasn't a lot of money, but I was a poor grad student. Both times, I doubled my money, sold out, and thought I was a genius. However, if I hadn't sold, that $4,000 in stock would've been worth $250,000 by the end of the 90s. I was standing in the middle of a gold mine, and I walked out. It. Kills. Me.

So now I have a strategy, and I stick to it religiously. I buy stock in lumps of $4,000 or $5,000. When I get to the point where I've made 20%, I sell out my original share and leave the profit in. That way, if the stock goes down I haven't lost any of my principal, and if the stock goes all Dell I'll still get the upside, albeit in a smaller dose. But I won't completely miss the boat.

I've been using this system for about 6 or 7 years now. The result is that I'm slowly building my own mutual fund of dividend-paying stocks with growth potential that I've hand-picked. It disseminates my risk but also gives me enough concentration that I have the potential to beat the market significantly.