Howard Marks

And yes, my tendency coming from the conservative background that I came from was to, what would you say, take some money off the table, take some of the profits.

I had this terribly misguided feeling that if you sell half, you can't be all wrong.

But of course, I wasn't dealing with securities with the potential of what Andrew deals with.

But anyway, for people whose parents were adults during the depression, who were brought up with don't put all your eggs in one basket, save for a rainy day, that kind of thing, you take some profits.

If you're a more optimistic bent, the timing of your birth was more fortuitous.

You never heard those things.

And so maybe it's easier to hold for the long run.

You know, I wrote a memo on liquidity about eight years ago and Andrew gave me a great quote for that memo, the greatest quote.

And he said, if you see a chart of a stock that's been up for 25 years and you say, man, I wish I owned that stock.

Think of all the days you would have had to talk yourself out of selling.

So in selling out, I told the story of Amazon that I think it was 89 in 99, and then it fell to six in 01.

And let's say you were fortunate enough to buy it at six.

Would you start selling at 12?

Well, most people would start selling at 12.

It's a double.

Would you sell at 60, 10X?

10X.

What about 600, 100X?

And then it went up to 3,300.

So this idea that as soon as there's a profit, you should take some of it off the table seems like a huge mistake.