David Gardner: Try Never To Sell

In his recent interview on the Excess Returns Podcast, David Gardner explains why you should try never to sell. Here’s an excerpt from the interview:

Gardner: I would say try never to sell. We had a lot of fun with sell discipline earlier, I think too much is made of it. I think you have to think about selling a lot if you’re not buying good stuff in the first place.

Like maybe you were buying it for a trade you thought maybe we’re in a cycle and you’ll sell at the end of the cycle. You’re trying to time the market, and so many reasons that people sell are because the thing they bought in the first place they didn’t buy something excellent, or they didn’t buy something that would persist.

But those are the two things that I’m always trying to do is, I’m trying to buy things that are excellent, as early as possible, and I’m going to let that persist for better and for worse. So I really don’t have to think about selling too much.

So the less you think about selling the more you’re thinking about the quality of what you’re buying. Buffett has a great line, I’m paraphrasing here, something like – imagine if you had a ticket you could only punch 20 times in your life and they’re the 20 buys you can make, and you can never sell, and if you take something like that as your mentality I believe that you will do better with all of your investing than if you didn’t.

So I love the wisdom of don’t sell, try never to sell.

You can watch the entire interview here: