Finding the right time to get out is a difficult and personal...

Finding the right time to get out is a difficult and personal decision which everyone has to make for themselves. It also comes down to your appetite for risk. Early on in the piece when I thought WBT had the potential to be huge, I did an analysis of Afterpay to see what it would have taken to hold long, as I believed it was possible for WBT to reach those dizzying heights. If you bought Afterpay for $8.16 on 17/1/2018, by April it had dropped to $5.26 or a 36% loss. Then by August 2018 it had risen to $23 only to fall back to $10.36 by November which was a 55% loss from the high. There were more notable falls from highs through 2019 but I will skip to 2020. In February a high of $41.14 was recorded, only for it to fall back to $8.01 in March. In only a month 81% loss from the high and back to a price that was less than the initial purchase in 2018. If you got out at that time, you would have missed the next high 12 months later which was $160.05. Crazy stuff.

In doing this I thought to myself would I have held through all that, and if I just looked at price, I would say not. For me the lesson here was that I need to understand the business, how its travelling and do I think fundamentally it is going in the right direction or the wrong direction and not to base my decision off price alone. WBT has done some similar things going from $1.04 to $0.69 and then $2.26 to $1.38, then $4.12 to $1.55 and $4.48 to $1.93. During all of these drops my opinion has been that fundamentally the company is going well and nothing has changed. Had I cut my losses on any of these declines I would never have seen my holding at $9. So my thinking is it is going to pull back as no share ever goes straight up. It wont be fun watching the paper profits disappear, but I still believe there is much more growth to come from here in the long run and I am confident we will see price well above $9 in a relatively short time. I could sell today and have a life changing amount, but my goal from here is to have a lifetime changing amount, preferably through dividend.

I am prepared to take the risk to achieve my goals. This has burnt me in the past, but is going nicely at the minute. There are no guarantees here, and everyone has to assess the risk for themselves. I live from pay to pay, and never have spare money. Every time I see a big red day it does hurt, but I remind myself that there are also green days like that. I am betting on more green than red, and the fact that the amounts are getting bigger is exciting and not something to be feared.

This is my perspective and may not be relevant for your risk appetite or personal circumstance, but I thought i would share in case it helps.