Chungst

My Walgreen Mistake - What Went Wrong?

Having been a Buy-Side Analysts (BSA) to very demanding (if not unreasonable) PMs, I have to say that you are judging yourself using the WRONG metric, which is the stock price.

The rule I and other BSA use is being right for the right reasons or being right about the market. That is to say, we judge ourselves on stuff that we can control, not on stuff we can't control, such as the stock price (in a similar vein, corporate CEOs should be held accountable the same way). If our analysis did in fact come true, i.e. we were able to predict the company's future performance and HOW the performance manifest itself, that is important not the change in the stock price. Or said different, you get the valuation drivers right, and hopefully the stock price will follow.

So when you wrote: "I still believe shares of Walgreen should be a phenomenal long-term investment," then why are you judging yourself on short term stock movements (i.e. 1 year stock movement) because generally long term would be something like 5 to 10 years into the future.

In summary, the acid test is the quality of your original investment thesis, and not whether you made money or not (separately buying with a significant margin of safety also helps).

Good luck.