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chapter 18 the 12 silliest and most dangerous things people say about stock prices since graduate school offered a continuous stream of theories about stocks each one is more misguided than the last the following statements are the 12 silliest things people say about stock prices i present them here hoping you'll dismiss them from your mind silly statement number one if it's gone down this much already it can't go much lower i bet the owners of polaroid shares were repeating this very phrase after the stock had fallen a third of the way down from its high of 143 and a half polaroid had been a solid company with a blue chip reputation when earnings and sales collapsed a lot of people didn't pay attention to how overpriced the stock was instead they continue to reassure themselves that if it's gone down this much already it can't go much lower the fact is polaroid did go much lower this great stock fell from 143 to 14 and a half in less than a year only then did you can't go much lower turn out to be true the truth is there's simply no rule that tells you how low a stock can go silly statement number two you can always tell when a stock has hit bottom bottom fishing is a popular investor pastime but it's usually the fisherman who gets hooked trying to catch the bottom of falling stock is like trying to catch a falling knife it's normally a good idea to wait until the knife hits the ground sticks vibrates for a while and settles before you try to grab it grabbing a rapidly falling stock results in painful surprises you almost always grab it in the wrong place silly statement number three it's gone this high already how can it possibly go higher right you are unless of course you're talking about a stock like philip morris philip morris is one of the greatest stocks of all time if you bought philip morris in the 1950s the equivalent of 75 cents a share you might have been tempted to sell it for 250 a share in 1961.
the theory being that this stock couldn't go much higher 11 years later with the stock selling for seven times the 1961 price and 23 times the 1950s price you might again have concluded it couldn't go any higher but if you sold it then you would have missed the next seven bagger on top of the last 23 bagger there's no arbitrary limit on how high a stock can go if the story stays good and the earnings continue to improve and the fundamentals don't change silly statement number four it's only three dollars a share what can i lose how many times have you heard people say this maybe you said it to yourself you come across some stock that sells for three dollars a share and you're thinking it's a lot safer than buying a 50 stock i'd worked in this business for almost 20 years before it finally dawned on me that whether a stock cost fifty dollars a share or one dollar share if it goes to zero you lose everything the point is that a lousy cheap stock is just as risky as a lousy expensive stock silly statement number five eventually they always come back people said rca would come back 65 years passed and it never did when you consider the thousands of banker companies to solving companies that never regain their foreign prosperity and companies that get bought out at prices far below their all-time highs you begin to see the weakness in this argument silly statement number six it's always darkest before the dawn it's very human to believe that when things have gotten a little bad they can't get any worse for example people invested on the basis of freight car deliveries amazed when business dropped from a peak of over 95 000 units delivered in 1979 to a low less than 45 000 units in 1981.
this was the lowest level in 17 years and nobody imagined it could get worse however from 45 000 units it dropped to 17 500 1982 and then to 5700 in 1983. this was a whopping 90 decline in a once vibrant industry sometimes it's always darkest before the dawn but then again in the stock market other times it's always darkest before pitch black silly statement number seven one rebounds to ten dollars i'll sell very often downtrodden stocks never returned to the level in which you decided you'd sell in fact the minute you say it gets back to 10 i'll sell you probably doom the stock to several years of teetering around just below 975 before it keels over to four on its way down to one this painful process may take a decade all the while you're tolerating an investment you don't even like because some inner voice tells you to get ten dollars for it whenever i'm tempted to fall for this one i remind myself that unless i'm confident enough in the company to buy more shares ought to be selling immediately silly statement number eight what me worry conservative stocks don't fluctuate much two generations of conservative investors grew up with the idea you couldn't go wrong with utility stocks then suddenly there were nuclear problems and rate-based difficulties stocks like consolidated edison lost 80 percent of their value then just as suddenly con ed gained back more than it had lost there simply isn't a stock you can own that you can afford to ignore silly statement number nine it's taking too long for anything to ever happen if you give up on a stock because you're tired of waiting for something wonderful to happen that something wonderful will begin to happen the day after you get rid of it most of the money i make is in the third or fourth year that i own something although sometimes it takes longer if all's right with the company and whatever attracted me to it hasn't changed i'm confident that sooner or later my patients will be rewarded silly statement number 10 look at all the money i've lost i didn't buy it regarding someone else's gain as your personal loss is not a productive attitude for investing in the stock market the worst part about this kind of thinking is that it leaves people to try and play catch-up they buy stocks they shouldn't buy under the illusion they are protecting themselves from losing more than they've already lost this usually results in real losses silly statement number eleven i missed that one i'll catch the next one the trouble is the next one rarely works if you miss toys r us a great company that continues to go up and by greenman brothers a mediocre company that went down you compounded your error you've taken a mistake that cost you nothing because you didn't lose anything by not buying toys r us and turned into a mistake that cost you a lot in most cases it's better to buy the good company at a high price than is to jump in on the next one at a bargain price silly statement number 12 stocks gone up so i must be right or the stocks go down so i must be wrong if i had to choose one great fallacy of investing it's believing that when a stock's price goes up it means you've made a good investment all it means when a stock goes up or down after you've bought it is there was somebody was willing to pay more or less for the same merchandise i've bought stocks at 10 that went to 14 that now if they double you couldn't buy a hershey bar with them i bought stocks at 10 that went to six that are now 40 it's what happens to fundamentals that really counts over the long term
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