Pediatric Dentist 🦷 | Business Owner | Investor | Daily posts on index funds, business lessons learned the hard way & sports cards. Not financial advice.
Joined May 2021
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I spend a lot of time telling people to buy index funds.
I also pick individual stocks.
Those two things aren’t contradictory.
My ETFs are the foundation of my portfolio.
But if I’m going to take the additional risk of owning an individual company, I have one expectation:
It needs to outperform the S&P 500.
Otherwise, why am I doing the extra work?
I’ve had some good ones:
$PLTR at $10, +1,582%
$META at $95, 615%
$LRCX at $61, +345%
$SHOP at $29, +336%
$CRWD at $64, +283%
$PANW at $149, +152%
$NBIS at $88, +150%
$ASML at $690, +136%
I’ve had misses too. And I’ll have more.
That’s stock picking.
But there are 5 companies I own today that I believe can outperform the S&P 500 between now and 2030.
Here’s my thesis on each, and what could make me wrong. 🧵
Halloween is the one night a year when children demonstrate better trading discipline than most adults.
They’ll trade three Snickers for one king size Reese’s without a second thought.
Meanwhile, a 42 year old man is still holding a stock that’s down 70% because he’s “waiting to get back to even.”
My 11 year old understands opportunity cost better than half of FinX.
And his entire portfolio is sitting in a plastic pumpkin.
Let’s put $115.14 in to $VOO this Halloween and see where we end up this time next year.
What I got wrong this week:
I spent too much time trying to solve problems that probably didn’t need me to solve them.
One of the harder parts of owning a business is realizing that just because you CAN do something doesn’t mean you SHOULD be the one doing it. I know this.
I’ve probably given that exact advice to other business owners. Yet here I am, doing the same thing.
Apparently, knowing better and doing better are two entirely different skill sets. Still working on the second one.
There is a part of my portfolio I never think about. Every week, money goes into the same ETFs. $VOO, $VGT, $SMH, $VB. It has run since March 2023, and I could not tell you what it did this week without looking.
That is the point. The boring part of my portfolio is the part that lets me take swings everywhere else. It is the foundation that makes the fun stuff possible.
Most investors I know have it backward. They spend all their energy on the exciting part and ignore the boring part that actually builds wealth.
Saturday morning reminder: boring is doing the heavy lifting while you drink your coffee.
What is the boring part of your portfolio doing for you?
Boring money update.
The automatic investing still ran. The bills still got paid. Nothing exciting happened.
That used to disappoint me.
Now it’s my favorite kind of week.
Excitement usually sends me an invoice later.
Boring just quietly does its job.
Another week of buying $VOO, $VGT, $SMH and $VB. Same routine I’ve followed for more than three years.
Didn’t need to predict the Fed, find the next 10 bagger, or stare at my brokerage account all day.
Just kept doing what I said I was going to do.
What boring habit does the most work in your life?
In one year from now, we will not be talking about the past week in the stock market and how much our portfolios were down.
Bookmark it.
Every Friday after my last patient leaves…
I sit in the same chair.
The office is finally quiet.
And this week, I don’t have much to report.
No major emergencies.
No particularly difficult business decisions.
No problems that kept me awake at night.
Just four days of taking care of patients, working through the usual challenges, and going home.
After the past several weeks, I’ll gladly take it.
It’s been a busy stretch.
Staffing challenges. Difficult conversations. Big decisions about the future of our practice.
And while none of those things have magically disappeared, this week felt a little more manageable.
Having a four-day workweek certainly helped.
I needed that extra day more than I probably realized.
Sometimes I get so accustomed to moving from one problem to the next that I forget what it feels like to have a relatively uneventful week.
No big wins to celebrate.
No disasters to recover from.
Nothing particularly profound to share.
And that’s perfectly fine with me.
I’ve spent enough Fridays sitting in this chair trying to make sense of difficult weeks.
This time, I’m just sitting here appreciating one that wasn’t.
That’s all I’ve got this week.
And I’m pretty happy about it.
My week in three lines.
Markets: Watched investors go from convinced the world was ending to looking for the next buying opportunity and back to “it’s all over.” Business as usual.
Practice: Another week of full schedules with some falling a part, difficult decisions, and trying to squeeze more hours out of a day that stubbornly refuses to have more than 24.
Me: Got my workouts in, drank an unreasonable amount of coffee, and tried to remind myself that not every waking hour needs to be productive.
That’s the whole report. Some weeks you make progress. Other weeks you just keep everything moving. Both count.
How would you sum up your week in three lines?
Friday thought after a long week at the practice.
Tired me makes different money choices than rested me.
Tired me wants quick wins. Rested me is fine with slow ones.
So I try not to make big decisions on Friday afternoons anymore. I write the idea down and I look again on Monday.
Most ideas look smaller after a weekend. The good ones are still there.
When do you make your worst decisions?
My hardest investing problem is not buying.
I can buy through a bad week. I can hold through bad news.
Taking a profit still feels strange, like I am quitting on something that worked.
This year I am working on a simple question. What is this money actually for?
If I can answer that, selling gets easier.
I sold $NOW before earnings and have not used the money yet, but it is going to pay for a vacation with my family, and that is memories we get to keep.
Do you struggle more with buying, holding, or selling?
In 2012, Facebook $META went public at $38 per share. A few months later, the stock was trading below $20. Investors were questioning the company's future. The IPO was being called a disaster.
I was 26 years old, broke, and getting ready to start dental school. And I was buying Facebook.
Not because I understood valuation models particularly well. Not because I had some sophisticated investment strategy. I just saw something that made sense to me. People were spending enormous amounts of time on Facebook. Businesses wanted to reach those people. And I figured if Facebook could connect the two, there was an awful lot of money to be made.
So I bought as many shares as I could afford. Which, as a broke 26 year old preparing for dental school, wasn't exactly a fortune.
Then something wild happened. I went to dental school. Four years of exams, studying, and trying to figure out how to become a dentist. Then another two years of pediatric residency. I was busy building a career. I pretty much forgot about those Facebook shares.
By the time I finished residency in 2019, the company I had bought for less than $20 per share was trading at roughly ten times that price.
I didn't spend those years studying technical charts. I didn't try to predict the next earnings report. I didn't sell because somebody on television said the stock was overvalued. I was too busy learning how to fix teeth.
And looking back, I think there's a lesson in that. The most important investment decision I made wasn't necessarily buying Facebook in 2012. It was leaving it alone long enough for the business to prove whether I was right.
Now, I don't want to pretend every investment works out this way. Plenty of companies never fulfill their potential. Some disappear entirely. And I certainly didn't know how successful Facebook would become. But I understood the basic business. I believed it had an opportunity to become something much bigger. And then I gave it time.
A full waiting room looks like success.
It can also mean we are behind and families are waiting too long.
Growth that makes the experience worse is not really growth. I think about that a lot with companies that
grow fast.
Fast is easy to brag about. Good is harder.
As a UNC alum who grew up in High Point and takes his North Carolina BBQ very seriously, I feel personally attacked by this.
Somehow managed to get three different stereotypes on the same bingo card.
And the worst part?
I can’t even argue with any of them.
I’m apparently just a walking North Carolina starter pack who happens to live in Pennsylvania now.
Headline I kept seeing today: Alphabet $GOOGL dropped 10 percent after earnings while Microsoft $MSFT jumped 4 percent.
Plain English version: Both companies are spending a fortune on AI, but Microsoft paid for it with cash it actually made, and Alphabet paid for it with cash it did not have.
What I am doing about it: Nothing different. I own great businesses for years, not for one earnings call.
Let’s see where this one trades a year from now. 5 years from now. 10 years from now.
$GOOGL
