Bye Bye Individual Shares

And a little Bye Bye getquin

Recently I sold my last single share $ETSY (-1.16%) . So my portfolio consists of only 3 ETF and a bit of crypto with a clear focus on $BTC (-0.09%) . But why did I take this step? And why also a little bye bye getquin?

Individual shares do not let me sleep peacefully

The first investment where this became clear to me was $K (-0.77%) . Bought on a whim, didn't really analyze it well, and therefore kept looking at the portfolio. And by constantly, I mean constantly. Even more often than usual. After 56 days I pulled the ripcord and fortunately sold with a profit of 9%. With other investments this was not quite as bad, especially if I had thought about the investment beforehand. Nevertheless, I look at the portfolio much less often overall since I no longer hold shares in individual companies. My confidence in the global economy is huge, but my confidence in individual companies is rather low.

My investments in individual stocks are too small to significantly boost my performance.

I can beat the market with smart selection of individual stocks. However, I simply lack the 🥚🥚 to invest significant sums in individual companies. I felt comfortable with 1k investment per share. Of course, if the total size of the portfolio is only 10, 20k, that's a significant amount. But as my portfolio got bigger and bigger, I continued to feel comfortable with only 1k per share. But the impact on the total portfolio of those 1k shares at the same time became smaller and smaller. Even a tenbagger, if you are lucky enough to catch one, doesn't really boost the performance of a 1k investment if the portfolio is 100, 200 or 500k.

Shares are not an investment for eternity

In general, my portfolio is buy & hold. I want to hold my positions until I am old and only then sell them or stop reinvesting dividends. Too late I understood that every company can go bankrupt in 30-50 years or at least disappear into insignificance. Even if I buy a stock out of conviction, I have to stay up to date and, in case of doubt, sell at the right time. That costs time that I wouldn't have to invest in an ETF portfolio. If the global economy goes down the drain, we'll have completely different problems.

Beating the market is costly and often unsuccessful.

The alternative to Buy & Hold is to select promising companies and hold them for a certain period of time. I pursued this "strategy" towards the end with $ETSY (-1.16%) , $GTLB (+6.98%) and $YOU (+0.31%) as a supplement to my ETF. However, I quickly realized that this eats up a lot more time (identifying the right company in the right environment with the right buying and selling times and dealing with the company + market environment much more frequently and intensively) and it is still anything but easy to beat the market with it. In addition, I lacked the 🥚🥚 to invest a significant amount.

Even a proprietary ETF made up of individual shares along the lines of @Simpson
is costly

At $VWRL (+0.18%) rebalancing is done automatically. I do not have to take care of anything. If I were to build my own ETF from individual shares, I would still have to deal with my portfolio frequently to exchange values if necessary. I prefer to pay the TER so that an index + provider does this automatically for me.

Crypto > Shares

Of course, the question remains why I part with my stocks but not my crypto. I have been involved with crypto since 2011 and thus much longer than with stocks. I understand crypto much better than stocks and also find it easier to stay on the ball there. Crises, macroeconomic changes, CEO changes, bad quarterly figures and all the other things that can have a lasting impact on the price of a stock do not interest my crypto strategy. Moreover, I take a much higher risk with crypto than with stocks, but at the same time I have gigantic return opportunities. 1k investments can definitely turn into a life-changing sum.

Bye Bye getquin

The community made a significant contribution to me finding my strategy and goal. For a long period of time I really read every (!) post on getquin and at the same time wrote down my thoughts and insights in my own posts (sorry, my posts were not for you, but primarily for me - just like donkeys are). I found my strategy and my goal. I was able to multiply my financial education. Of course, it is not impossible that I will change my strategy in the future and I am certainly not omniscient. But I currently feel so comfortable with my knowledge and strategy that there are only a few posts on getquin that catch my interest. Accordingly, I also read posts much less frequently than I did a few months ago. In addition, there are only a few topics that interest me so much and that have not yet been discussed that I would like to write a post about them.

Nevertheless I will of course stay with getquin. I will continue to annoy you with my comments and I still have 1 or 2 posts up my sleeve that I definitely want to publish. But you will certainly read less from me in the near future.

Sooooooo much free time

Less involved with finances, less often looking at the depot, spending less time on getquin, ... what am I doing with all my free time? Well, there are 2 major changes coming this year in my life, which certainly also contributed to the fact that I want to deal less with finances and everything around it.

First, I'm going to start a new job, which will of course eat up a lot of time, especially in the first few months, which I'll have to save elsewhere. But because of the higher salary, I can then more comfortably afford not to beat the market and just stubbornly invest in ETF 😁. And on the other hand, if all goes well, I'll be a dad for the 1st time this year 😍.

So there are many reasons for me to set my priorities differently in a few months - and I will. Of course, I still hope that I can stay in the community with my new job and as DonkeyDad, even if not as active as before. In this course I will also stop my participation in our podcast. You will find out when exactly that will be. For now, a few interviews are planned. I will definitely continue to track my portfolio here, you have really done a great job in the last few months, @getquin !

In this sense, thank you once again to the community here, from which I was allowed to learn so much. You are the best 😍