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dryman's avatar

Instead of discipline, I recommend Halo Top. Awesome.

I think you're right that many value investors experienced a lot of FOMO during growth and meme stock outperformance, which for some led to buying into compounder bro type narratives too easily. However I can also see how investors convinced themselves at the time that they have incredible "discipline" in focusing on a long-term value approach to business quality, backed up by equally many Warren/Charlie homilies ("time is the friend of the wonderful business", "our favorite holding period is forever", etc).

In many/most cases genuine business quality was just not there and the apparent compounders were genuine Ponzis. But part of the story is just that forecasting the value of future growth is very difficult and uncertain; and a low probability of massive distant profits seemed to have a lot more present value in a zero-rate environment than it does now. There are likely a few genuine compounder babies being thrown out with the Ponzi bathwater, but they're honestly harder to predict with confidence then we'd all like to think.

Anyway, pass the Halo Top. Too bad Wells Enterprises is private.

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MikeFromNZ's avatar

I also have no discipline around ice cream so I try to avoid buying it, but hopefully I could avoid eating ice cream that Andrew had dipped his toe into, especially after a sweaty PTON workout.

PTON was a classic hedge fund manager stock. Hedge fund managers are wealthy and competitive and all worked from home when the pandemic hit, so they all bought PTONs. Then they all bought the stock after discovering that all their hedge fund bros had also bought PTONs. What could go wrong? EVERYONE was buying PTONs!!

Groupthink can preserve hedge fund stocks way past their expiration dates, but if the wheels don't come off (mangling infants in their conveyor belts) hedge fund groupthink can permanently inflate valuation multiples, contributing some degree of buoyancy in volatile markets.

https://www.instagram.com/midtownuniform/

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