Anyone who says investing isn’t personal has never made a bad investment. And anyone who has never made a bad investment hasn’t been investing for very long. This summer, I woke up one morning and realized that Moderna shares had jumped from $20/share at the outset of the pandemic to $497/share at the top of its mRNA mountain.
‘How could I have missed this run up?’ I thought to myself.
I distinctly remember searching for bargains when the market tanked in March of 2020. My best ideas at the time were to buy shares of Hawaiian Airlines at $11/share because travel would eventually bounce back and Hawaii never gets old, buy shares of Microsoft at $152/share because they had just beat Amazon for a huge cloud based defense contract (it was later taken away) and Goldman Sachs at $172/share because it was trading at a P/E of 8 and there’s a lot of really smart people at Goldman who can function at a high level on 203 hours of sleep at night well into their 50’s as they figure out more ways to boost the share price.
What I didn’t do is realize that Moderna was one of two companies testing a vaccine that could be worth hundreds of millions of dollars as our best hope of ending the pandemic. So what did I do about it? I was so annoyed that I missed this story that I bought shares of Moderna at $468.
Fast forward four months and my Moderna shares are down 45% and counting. Since my irrational purchase, I’ve learned that Moderna was unwilling to share its vaccine with third world countries unable to pay full price, (talk about bad karma!) and most recently produced an mRNA based flu vaccine that is no more effective than the vaccines that we already have.
So what did I learn? First, it you miss the run up, don’t waste your time obsessing over it because undoubtedly it won’t end well. Secondly, don’t be greedy. There will always be another idea, another story, another investment road to travel down because, well, the world is always changing and new companies are born every day. Finally, when you know in your heart you’re making a poor investment decision solely based on self-hatred, give yourself a break and buy more shares of Apple. That never ends badly.
