This is another angle on the \u201chow many shares\u201d question.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Over the years I have observed many successful private and professional investors. There have been a very few \u2013 including some, but not all, of the investors in Free Capital<\/em><\/strong> \u2013 about whom I\u2019ve thought \u201cIf I ever get bored of investing, I’d be happy for them to manage my money.\u201d <\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n Most of these people have eventually disappointed me. The disappointments have tended to arise because they got stuck with concentrated positions \u2013 10% of one small company, 20% of another \u2013 and were unable to react when the world changed against the businesses to which they had made large commitments. <\/p>\n\n\n\n This affects even the very greatest investors. Look at Warren Buffett: large positions in the Washington Post<\/em> and other print newspapers, businesses which now look a lot like manufacturers of horse-drawn carriages, circa 1900.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Having seen many people whom I greatly admired come a cropper with concentrated positions, I\u2019ve become less enamoured of extreme concentration. Nothing grows forever; most investors come a cropper eventually; and concentrated positions in illiquid shares make it hard to escape from your mistakes.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" This is another angle on the \u201chow many shares\u201d question. Over the years I have observed many successful private and professional investors. There have been a very few \u2013 including some, but not all, of the investors in Free Capital \u2013 about whom I\u2019ve thought \u201cIf I ever get bored of investing, I’d be happy for them to … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-23","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.guythomas.org.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.guythomas.org.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.guythomas.org.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.guythomas.org.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.guythomas.org.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=23"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.guythomas.org.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":24,"href":"https:\/\/www.guythomas.org.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23\/revisions\/24"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.guythomas.org.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=23"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.guythomas.org.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=23"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.guythomas.org.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=23"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}