@interrobangbros excuse me? I suppose you probably misunderstood what I’m saying.

@sammeciar Perhaps I did. It seemed to be the same sentiment I saw a lot on Twitter and Reddit in late 2020 and early 2021 when people were extremely confident in their abilities to know which companies will be awful and which are the obvious winners. In my opinion, it's irrational for anyone to think that. If it was obvious, everyone would be billionaires. Someone can do all the work in the world and know a company inside and out but no one, not a single person, can predict the future. At least, that's my stance. That's why I buy and hold and try to sell as little as possible. The 120 years of data suggests the longer you hold a diversified portfolio, the more likely you are to produce market beating returns. Have I bought losers that I thought would be winners? Fuck yes. So many lol. But overall, this has helped me beat my benchmarks for 14 years. I know I'll buy losers. I'm fine with that because I know (hope lol) the winners will do better than the losers.

@interrobangbros my point was, this is the environment where it's apparent who has the ability to become more efficient and take advantage of the situation, and who is running an unsuccessful model that isn't sustainable. One of the examples would probably be $LYFT vs $UBER. Both treated pretty much equally for years, yet Uber is taking advantage, optimizing costs, and becoming leaner while Lyft is struggling, management seems to not have any answer to this as Lyft continues to lose market share. Similarly with all the EV startups in the mania. Dozens of companies were called the next Tesla. None of them in reality are.

Things like these make it even easier for me as an investor to determine the outliers in the race, much quicker.

@sammeciar Gotcha. I'll still disagree with the idea that we know, for example, Lyft won't become sustainable while Uber will only continue to improve (past performance doesn't guarantee future results) but I definitely did misconstrue a bit so my apologies there.

@interrobangbros Not saying we know for sure, but it's very visible who is leading the efforts and who is playing catchup. Increasingly so I'm making a watchlist of companies that continue to beat and raise guide even throughout this tougher macro period, I believe this will be useful for potential future use. Nothing is free for businesses like it was in 2020-21, and so those who continue to dominate and up their game must be doing something very well.

@sammeciar Yeah, this is how I interpreted it as well.

It's the cliché metaphor "when the tide goes out you get to see who's swimming naked".

In a more challenging business environment, we get to see whose business models are sustainable, whose balance sheets are stronger and whose operations are better quality.

Frothy economic environments hide the pretenders that eventually get exposed in recessionary times. This is such time. Investors get better optics into seeing the separation between the best businesses and their weaker competitors.

It's also the best time for individual stock investors to cast a more critical eye on the stocks they already own and jettison the ones who aren't what you thought they were.

@jazziyoung spot on Jazzi!