@jaybeejacks Welcome to the club of fellow DW8 shareholders!
I wanted to offer some thoughts on your comment ("...
I have bought in at 18.5c so I hope it goes up soon because it hurts seeing my account listed as a big negative from my original price..") since presumably a number of new shareholders with a cost basis above Friday's closing price share this sentiment wondering if they possibly made a mistake. In a nutshell: "IMO, NO and you will be ok!", assuming that you stick to basic fundamentals of investing, common sense, and control your behavioral biases (aka your emotions). Your control over your cost basis is limited aside from actively averaging it down if the opportunity presents itself and you have the means to do it, so worrying about it ex-post makes no sense. Learn from the FOMO experience and adjust your process going forward as the return you can expect to generate depends on a number of factors, including your purchase and sell price. And assuming you don't have unrealistic expectations regarding your expected return and the expected time frame, you will IMHO be fine when looking back at this investment later this year, not to mention in 12, 24, or 36 months from now (when you will likely kick yourself like many here wondering why they didn't buy more when they first entered). I got a sizable position and if I had gone all-in initially I wouldn't have doubled my cost basis by adding on more when the SP was multiples of when I initially entered. It's all good though as I added as I gained more conviction as I saw Dean and the company deliver on what they set out to do.
Seeing red in one's portfolio is never easy but try to put things objectively into perspective. This is an investment in a micro/small-cap stock and the return volatility experienced on avg in this market cap segment substantially exceeds that of mid, large, and mega-cap stocks (consult the return standard deviations for reference). That makes sense as you'd expect a positive correlation between the risk/return trade-off you are looking to exploit by investing in this type of stock and not Westpac. In addition, you bought into FOMO which in the short-term may see some reversal -- or not -- depending on what happens with fundaments, sentiment, flow, any unexpected announcements, or other developments impacting the company. In general, stock prices could be all over the place at any point in time and you should mentally prepare yourself for that, just in case, any time you make an investment regardless of cap segment...but even more so in segments where you are expecting higher returns to compensate for the higher level of risk! So worrying about an approximately 20% move is misplaced, especially when 12 months ago that was the minimum daily move either direction when the stock was trading around 0.5c. Listen to what Charly Munger/W Buffet said about investing in stocks and being ok with multiple 50% pullbacks during their holding periods. And that this is in typically large-cap and mega caps, so you should get more comfortable with potential volatility in a micro/small-cap investment. Remember that volatility goes both ways and is what offers opportunity as this can help calm the nerves when needed.
Putting the last couple of trading days into context of the past 12 months, the reversal isn't even close to what we experienced last year, and last year was very benign (due to the strong fundamentals of the company even at that time, which have improved even more since then) in contexts of historical micro and small-cap performance where 50% plus swings in either direction during a month/quarter are not unusual. Sentiment can push valuation dislocations both ways and tend to typically overshoot both directions, which may offer opportunities for skilled investors (more on that below). I am not forecasting if the SP will retrace further, the message is to simply evaluate all inputs in their appropriate context.
Fundamentally we are a lot further advanced vs. last year in terms of the company's infrastructure buildout and strategy realization and there have been tons of developments (@TGA123 posted a great high-level summary) which in addition to technicals can give you an indication of where the SP may find support in the near-term. Likewise remember that things can turn quickly on even one news item coming out of the blue, like the eBay note on a Friday. Who saw that coming (at that very specific day)?!?! And if you're not in the market then good luck chasing it.
Every investor faces emotions and retracements have a disproportionally larger emotional impact on my psyche compared to advances for example, so I feel your pain. And the larger the capital base grows the larger the impact as the AUD amount is larger even if the % change is the same. Yes, champagne problems but it still hurts. That is natural and I try to counteract that by reverting back to my thesis, expected time horizon, and reviewing if anything has changed that may require action. And that helps keep an even keel evaluating comments and opinions posted on HC, especially some of the altruistic truth bombs dropped this past week by investors who wanted to educate others about the imminent loss of their life savings due to the extreme overvaluation plaguing the stock which truly warmed my heart. I was quite gripped by the selfless nature of these comments of those spending all their days educating the rest of us on dislocation between company valuation and unproven business model and lacking financials, despite them not holding any the stock and posting sentiment as 'sell'. Simply kindhearted people with no interest in the stock at all, they just felt that spending their days educating their fellow men is the best use of their time providing charity to the needy...until a few days later when the SP fell boldly confirming they're actually interested in buying shares, just not at the prices it was trading at, so they decided to down ramp. So beware what motives a poster may have and treat statements accordingly, be it ramping up to create FOMO and sucker people to offload the stock to them, ramp down to create fear and acquire shares from fearful investors when they feel its better to sell than lose it all, or trying to influence in any manner. Not everyone will be as obvious about it as some are.
This forum contains a lot of seemingly decent folks who freely share their views and are happy to engage in constructive dialogs, but it's down to you to ensure you're not unduly swayed one way or another by DYOR (and all that goes with it). Unfortunately ramping plays directly on the behavioral biases that are most difficult to control for many, especially for those investing or actively trading in smaller-cap names. There's a reason why 99% of people opening trading accounts lose their funds within 2-3 years' time and why tons of trading gurus sell the 'secret sauce' to willing and paying people who believe they are falling into the 1%, not the 99%. But if you ask them if they believed their probability of winning the lotto is substantially higher than the next guy any rational person should say no. Yet somehow a sense of self-aggrandizement leads most to believe they are in the 1% and possess more experience, skills, common sense, etc than others, including professionals getting paid to do this for a living. Anyway, believing that one may be '
that skilled guy in the 1%' who can successfully predict and trade turning points for their exact duration may, in the end, cost more than a buy&hold approach regardless of whether rampers may give the impression there's more to be gained the other way around. We always hear about the winners, very seldom about the losers -- something to ponder. There's plenty of data out there to evaluate strategies, probabilities of success, etc to draw one's own conclusion on what approach suits one's mental and technical capabilities. As Peter Lynch once said, "Far more money has been lost by investors preparing for corrections or trying to anticipate corrections than has been lost in corrections themselves." I reckon the same could be said for those trying to actively trade them due to an overconfidence in their abilities.
I am very much with the likes of
@geem,
@steve10, tas, p17, and everyone else whose focus is on the LT sp potential and expressing that belief via a high conviction position size. Getting excited about ST price performance is nice on the way up, yet torturous on the way down (even if just temporarily), and it's important to remember we are in a structural uptrend that IMO is soundly supported by the firm's growth which is literally only at the beginning of its life cycle. Focus on the bigger picture and check your emotions -- the rest will take care of itself. Unless I and plenty of other LT holders, including industry insiders, here are completely wrong this will go way beyond where we thought a year ago the limit for the firn's development was based on what we have seen them achieve since. You're in the right stock (imo), now to the harder part -- holding on for the entirety of the ride. DYOR, GLTAH.
(20min delay)