It's been a wrestle PB because I still wholeheartedly think that management should live up to what they say and not talk-up things like non-dilutive funding, when they have only the slimmest chance of happening anytime soon. There have been a few occasions where that's rubbed me up the wrong way. It's a wrestle because, as you correctly say, it's never going to be a smooth ride, and at some point I have to get comfortable with the fact that this is how the sausage gets made.
I suppose I did go dark, but that was aligned with how troubled I was becoming about how things were panning out. I reserve the right to go dark again! I haven't had an epiphany or anything, or fallen for Paul's evangelical promises all over again. I just realised that I had my intensity for a deal pumped up to eleven, and that it isn't as crucial at this stage of the trip as I had made it in my head. Again, I think had the business not continued to enthusiastically dangle that carrot, it wouldn't be so annoying for shareholders to see it continuously disappear over the horizon. However, management of all listco's will naturally give positive possibilities to the market in support of share price and market sentiment, and I ought to treat that for what it is.
I had anchored myself to the first deal. Anchoring being a very strong force in investing, one needs to spot it and understand it. You see it all over these boards. People anchored to their average price, to a sentence uttered 2 years ago, to what happened to them on a previous investment, or what happened with another company in the same sector recently - it's a completely natural instinct to anchor, but it can be dangerous, it can drag you down. I always thought I had a handle on what HC was, just a repository for the emotions of investors, the wounded and the euphoric both. Daily exposure to it, isn't a good thing though. It is an echo chamber, it is a bubble. It moves like a herd, and it's sometimes difficult not to move with it. I'm glad I took the opportunity to see into PAR recently, and realise that i'd been exposing myself to this bubble a bit too much. It revealed that so much of the confident righteous pontificating that goes on here, is off the mark. Just hurt people spraying their emotions on a wall, often daily. What's going on inside PAR right now, by comparison, is intelligent diligent earnest people, working their socks off to achieve something massive. It was good to get the opportunity to visit the team and see who they are, where they work and what they're doing. It was good to have the opportunity to share information and concerns with them outside of the HC bubble. It was good to have the opportunity to shed that one particular anchor of mine. The whole thing with opportunities is that if you don't take them, you miss them, and i'd probably still be in the dark if i'd missed this one.
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