re Forever
If you hold forever, you pay no tax in your lifetime, so you get the best possible after-tax rate of return. If your investment's management is consistent, you can get more money with less work as an investor with a fire-and-forget approach. Buffett's value investing strategy has beaten lots of naysayers, and has done it consistently for decades.
The only reason to bail is that the company is a lower-quality investment than you used to believe. Right? I'd rather be able to hold forever. I expect MA, ACAS, MKL, GS, and other companies I'm interested in to remain competitive and profitable (the culture in the companies encourages quality successor leadership, in my view, thus quality long-term returns). I wouldn't expect to sell. Heck, if the story fired up on CAAH or ETLT I could adopt the same attitude -- but at present my investing thesis is about folks waking up to the news that business is good in China.
Incidentally, Buffett isn't religious about "forever". He revisits valuations and makes decisions on keeping holding -- witness the high-profile PetroChina sale he made. The fact PetroChina was no longer a good value investment was clear in hindsight after PetroChina plummeted. He'd rather have held forever, but the evidence on the investment just didn't bear it out.
I should do so well!
Take care,
--Tex.
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