What happened?
Just kidding :-)
Wondering who else caught the falling knife earlier this year and is now sitting on a strong gain?
There have been a lot of threads over the past six months where I’ve made the same point: in the short term, the market is a voting machine, but in the long term, it’s a weighing machine.
For me, the lowest-drama way to invest is to form a clear thesis around each company you own and why you think it is either poised for long-term growth or materially undervalued. Then watch how the business develops against that thesis and try not to get too distracted by the daily price action.
If the thesis remains intact, sometimes the best thing to do is simply be patient and give the market time to catch up. In Unity’s case, I’ve consistently felt that the key things to watch were Vector growth and how effectively the company could use its in-app purchase data.
I’m not trying to turn this into an “I told you so” post, especially since plenty could still go wrong. But given how much angst and negativity there has been here over the past six months, I do think this is a useful case study.
When a stock falls heavily, the important question is whether the business has actually deteriorated or whether sentiment has simply moved too far. You do not need to time the exact bottom. You just need to decide whether the stock looks materially cheap relative to your view of the fundamentals, avoid leverage, keep watching the business, and be patient.
And when the stock eventually moves sharply in your favour, it is worth thinking about position sizing rather than getting carried away.
Personally, I think Unity still has a lot more room to run in the short term and, based on the current thesis and available facts, could do very well over the long term too.
That said, markets are volatile and anything can happen: wars, inflation, execution problems, regulation, or a random competitor nobody is paying attention to yet.
So I’ll probably trim around 50% of the shares I bought earlier this year. Doubling my money in six months is good enough for me, and one of the other rules I try to follow is to stay diversified and not get too greedy :-)