Jason Hall

But Intuitive Surgical is up 1,570%.

MercadoLibre is a 39-bagger.

So we've gotten 16 times and 39 times that initial investment in total returns on those two stocks.

Now, to put it another way, Emily, and this is where it gets really powerful, let's say you bought Intuitive Surgical back in 2010, and you also bought 10 other stocks at the same time, invested the same money in those other 10 stocks, and all 10 of them went bankrupt.

you still would have earned 570% in gains because Intuitive Surgical did well.

Now, if it was MercadoLibre, you could have bought MercadoLibre and 37 other stocks that went to zero and you still would have made money.

The point is, if you sold out of either of those companies along the way because of competition concerns, valuation concerns, macro concerns, and there were plenty of opportunities along the way to do it, you would have missed out on their strong growth.

Which, by the way, Jeff, you mentioned this before, it's not over for either of these companies.

Emily, I want to start by saying I love that you used the word framework there.

I described earlier how our human nature sets us up to fail as investors, and a good framework beats rules all day.

Rules are stupid things like selling half of a stock that doubles and thinking of things as house money.

A framework helps us build a process that would assist us in making better decisions.

More importantly, it makes us harder to take actions that are not in our own best interest.

So my checklist for selling includes a few things.

The first, if I'm selling because I've reached a financial milestone and it's time for me to sell stock, maybe I need to shift some of that stock wealth I've accumulated to bonds or to cash because I'm closing in on a financial goal.

Maybe I'm in retirement or it's part of my income strategy.

Number one, that's great.

Guess what?

You're selling because you've reached financial goals.

That's optimal.