Ann: Quarterly Activities/Appendix 4C Cash Flow Report, page-59

Good post.

I think something many people fail to see is the difference between a good result and a result the market is going to like.

As I've generally said over the years, I like TNT, and I think they likely have a good future as a company. As I've recently said in agreement to dbd25 I think it was, I think it would be a good company from the inside (as an employee - it's a solid enough company, would pay well, I imagine it would have a good work environment, I wouldn't be freaking out about the doors permanently closing).

The problem is, I am not an employee of TNT, I am not the CEO or the mother of one of the directors feeling proud of my son. I'm a trader/investor, and as an investor, I dropped TNT like a hot potato while I was still in profit. As an investor I don't necessarily care if I like the company or its financials. I mean, generally these are prerequesits for me buying into a company and they were part of why I did in early 2020, but alone they are not enough for me to buy/hold. I need *the market* to like the company and financials for me to buy or hold. As an investor, that's what's important to me, and what I personally think about a company isn't actually important. I think the failure to make this distinction and recognise its importance is where a lot of people make sense. Being smarter than the market is only going to harm you if you assume the market is going to behave the same way you are.

When I sold out (and I discussed my reasons here even before I had started selling) I openly said that I was selling because the market was going to think TNT looked bad, not because I thought it was bad. The seasonality wasn't really understood by the market, we'd had our impressive quarter, and we had the best part of a year of worse quarters to look forward to. I knew that was going to crash the price, so I sold out with the intention of buying back around 20c, or maybe in the high teens if I was lucky. It did indeed drop to the price I was wanting, but I could still see that it was a long way away from *looking good* to the market, so I didn't buy back in (and my money had been put into greener pastures which was nice too). I did eventually begin to have concerns about the figures and state of the company, but I suppose leaving that aside to stay on the main point here, it was clear that this company was going to continue looking bad to the market, certainly worse than it looked in my eyes, and really, as an investor, that's what matters. I'm not buying the company to own as a private company and enjoy whatever revenue it generates, as an investor I am potentially buying a very small percentage of the company and my success or failure as an investor depends on market perception and action, and my decision is based on the direction the market is going to take the share price, not what the market would hypothetically do if it was always rational and correct. Make no mistake, the market is neither rational nor consistently correct in the short term. You can jump up and down complaining about the market being wrong all you want, but I'd rather correctly predict the market being wrong than get upset about being correct while the market is wrong.