SMCI was my biggest mistake
In all the years playing the market, we all have certain stocks we can look back at, that we owned and sold waaaaaay too early. For me, I can distinctly remember two stocks over the last few years. The most recent was SMCI. In the winter, I often walk at this park every morning from around 8 AM to 9 AM. We are talking 2022 to be exact, and around October/November. The stock had just fallen to $69 from around $80, and I thought it was a good entry, with $10 predicted in eps going forward. Day after day, week after week, the stock did nothing but trend between $71 and $80. So in January 2023, around 8-10 weeks after I bought, I sold, figuring the stock was just an unpopular hardware company, as the PE couldn't get past 7-8 going forward. About two or three weeks after I sold, the stock popped to $85 or so, and then by it hit $100. However without the knowledge of their servers going to AI, I just looked at it as fully valued around $100, and felt unlucky to have not been in for the 40%-50% pop I had been looking for. All of a sudden though one day around late March or early April, it was mentioned that SMCI's servers would power data centers switching to AI, and we know the rest of the story. For me, I felt I could value the stock in late 2022, but when it took off to $350 between May and July of 2023, I had no idea what PE going forward to give it, and at the time, I believe it was around 25 already. I never played SMCI after that, and just watched it fly to $1250 by early 2024, never knowing how to value it, and I still don't !
The next stock I missed out on was around April 2018 was TTD. It was a new popular website based platform, that basically made their money off advertising. I bought the stock after a great March qtr report, suggesting 25% + growth, but the PE at the time was around 40 going forward, and when comparing to GOOG or META, it was actually much higher, so I passed. I really liked the growth story through, and remember that GOOG held a 40-50 PE going forward while it was growing. However I ended up selling for about breakeven at $70 or so, figuring it was likely not going to get the PE GOOG did. However I was wrong big time, and the stock kept going up for the next two years to $900, while having a 50+ PE going forward the entire time !
