One of my favorite all-time emails from the Motley Fool arrived last week. It was simply titled “Sell SVB Financial.” The email stated, “with consistent liquidity over the past few weeks and hearings with uncertain outcomes in the days ahead, we think now is the time to say goodbye to SVB Financial if you haven’t sold your shares already.”
Really? Now is the time I should sell my shares? You mean after the nealy $10,000 I invested in the company, based on your recommendation, went down to a total value $6.18? Now I should sell my 18 shares bought at $532.70? Because if I don’t sell my shares now I won’t have consistent liquidity, I’ll have consistent broke-ass-idity?
And still, I feel like now is the exact wrong time to sell my shares. I feel like I should hold out a little longer. At $6.18, I am just $2.27 short of a chicken burrito at Chipotle. Of course if I want to add guacamole, that will be $2.65 extra bringing my grand total to $11.10. Look, we all have to have goals in life. Become President. Play in the NBA. Get enough from the bankruptcy courts to be able to afford a chicken burrito with a side of guacamole from the sale of our shares of SVB Financial.
The thing that rubbed me the wrong way was why not send this email a lot sooner? Like a LOT SOONER? Oh, I don’t know, why not send it the moment there was the first whiff of trouble? At least that way, investors may have been able to recoup half of their losses. As it stands, the Sell SVB Financial headline ranks amongst the greatest hindsight email headlines ever sent in the history of investing hindsight headlines. Here are the unofficial rankings:
- Sell Tulips Because They May Just be Regular Old Tulps (1638)
- OK, Maybe Y2K Isn’t A Thing And You’ll Be Fine (2001)
- Buy Shares of Apple, This Iphone May Be A Good Idea (2010)
- Don’t Invest In The Bernie Madoff Prison Fund, It’s Not A Thing (2009)
- Sell SVB Financial (2023)
It’s OK to be wrong. We’re all wrong. It’s part of being human. But when you are wrong, it’s also OK to apologize to your subscribers in a real way. To be fair, if you opened the email, it did go on to say, “We’re sorry to have put members into this position, whether they still hold SVB or sold out earlier.” It goes on to say that SVB was a great company, until it wasn’t but if you’re diversified it hopefully didn’t hurt too bad.
What would have been refreshing, and a fascinating read, would have been a complete review of the events and how The Motley Fool missed it. How did The Motley Fool not see it coming? What systems are now in place that will help get subscribers a sell signal sooner the next time one of your recommendations goes south? It’s one thing if a stock drops. All stocks drop. It’s something else entirely if the fundamental business is flawed and the company will cease being a company in a matter of weeks. That’s when, in the immortal words of Mortimer and Randolph Duke, we need to know exactly when to, “Sell, Sell, Sell.”
we need to know
