I'm reading Tae Kim's new The Nvidia Way and there's this FOMO tidbit about activist investor Starboard Value.
Obviously everyone is an excellent investor in hindsight, and Bitcoiners have plenty of stories like this (oooh, mhy ghood, akschually if I had only seen/kept/held/bought it back then when I had the chance!), but this is still pretty painful:
In 2013, Starboard Value acquired over 4 million shares of Nvidia, worth about $62m at the time. Nvidia was a little bit in a slump, had some 3bn in net cash on its balance sheets (out of 8bn market cap), and SV wanted some changed in management + distribution to shareholders. (if a company can't find profitable ventures for cash, it should give the money back to shareholders.) While Kim tells us that his sources all testify that the relationship was never very antagonistic, after Nvidia had made some concessions, its stock price rose some 20%.
Starboard Value thanked them kindly—and sold their shares.
If I did the math correctly, those shares should have been worth some $25 billion today (billion with a b). Fuck, Nvidia shares fell some 15% today in true bitcoin fashion, so make that $21bn. For those of you keeping track, that's missing out on about 28,000% return. Ouch!
"We should never have exited the position," Smith tells Kim in a painfully dramatic chapter ending.
I'm reminded of that Baron Rothschild quote ("I never buy at the bottom and I always sell too soon")—and also of the Benjamin Graham (hypocritical?) advice since I just read that book (#836811, #851506).
Nobody can know the future, and stories like these are always told in hindsight. But still: I dunno, man. I think I'd just quit after such a miss... like, nothing you ever do for the rest of your investing career is ever going to make up for that.
Like giving up 10,000 bitcoin for a pizza in, like, 2010.