Jason Hall

Now, if it's not for one of those reasons, you have to start asking myself why.

some questions.

I start with asking, am I selling for business reasons, macro reasons, or valuation reasons?

If the business is no longer meeting my thesis expectations, what has changed?

What's changed in the business?

Then I start asking myself, well, has that changed because of the business, for competition, or a macro reason?

If a business is going through a tough time in the cycle, macro things are

Often I force myself to really reevaluate my thought process because history tells us the worst time to selling a struggling stock is when macro or cycle factors are causing it to struggle.

You're probably selling the bottom.

If it's valuation, I force myself to evaluate the business from a longer term perspective.

Because using valuation for a very mature company like a Walmart or a Target is very different than a growth-oriented one, like the Rule Breakers that we've talked about, particularly for investors with very long time horizons.

My biggest sell mistakes were for valuation on businesses that can easily grow their revenues by 5X or 10X their current levels over the next 10 or 20 years.

it's almost always best to hold on in those cases if the business is historically done pretty well.

Valuation might make sense if it's a mature company that doesn't have those kind of growth things.

Now, I do two more things too, Emily.

I ask myself,

This question, if the stock doubles in five years or it goes up 5X over the next decade, will I regret selling it?

And then I force myself to wait two market days once I've made a decision before acting on that sell decision.

Cooling off period and regret minimization, those two things go a long way towards avoiding making those selling mistakes.

Happy Thanksgiving, Emily.