The one that got away - Microsoft.

I have been investing in individual stocks on and off since 2004. I still remember back then when i first transferred money from the bank account to the brokerage account, i contemplated hard between Yahoo, Microsoft, Apple and Google. I was fairly confident that investing in any of those 4 will result in capital appreciation over a few years.

I was looking to hold long term but did not necessarily look at dividends and the whole dividend growth investing style back then. I obviously ended up picking the worst of the 4 and purchased Yahoo. I mean, make no mistake i sold those shares back after over a year and still made over 20% - so don't get me wrong - it wasn't a bad choice, it just wasn't the best one, or the second best or the third :)



This brings me to Microsoft, which was trading in the lower to mid 20's back then, it did not have a long dividend history and was pretty range bound. I passed on it then, and ended up passing on it a few more times over the next 3 or 4 years. Cut to 2009 when the whole market was on a fire sale, looking back at that time now - it is so easy to say 'buying anything would have been better than buying nothing' - but for those of you who did not live through those months from October 2008 to March 2009 (and a few more months after) as an investor with skin in the game - it was scary as hell. It took a lot of courage to actually put more money in the market specially after seeing your portfolio go down every day, day after day.

In the back of my mind, i knew microsoft was going no where, the stock price could linger around but eventually make me money. I remember one day in Jan 2009, i added 100 shares of MSFT at around $18 a piece and went back and forth between the order update screen and the MSFT research screen on my brokerage website. While i knew it was not a bad investment, i also thought i could get a better price if i waited. After spending a couple of hours (back and forth) struggling with it , staring at the screen and playing different scenarios in my mind. I eventually ended up not buying.

I was right , it was a good call - in that MSFT went down another 12% from then and hit around $16 a share sometime in march that year (off course i did not act then either).

The next couple or so years it lingered in the lower to mid 20's, i was looking elsewhere and continued to find other opportunities in the market. In early 2013 after it got into the 30's was when i realized that it could break out , so i waited for it to get back to the upper 20's again to buy those 100 shares that i missed out on. My reasoning was that the market was just hot, a correction was due and 20's was the 'fair value' range at that point.
I have been waiting since that time - twiddling my thumbs, just recently it hit an all time high of about $86 a share. I am still waiting, but have obviously moved the bar on my expectation of a good entry point.

If i had pulled the trigger that day, the $1,800 investment would be about $8,500 today for a capital appreciation of $6,700. A 372% gain. What's more the current $1.68/share dividend would translate to a nice 9.3% yield on cost. Talk about a lost opportunity.

One of these days i hopefully will end up being a Microsoft share holder. *

This is just one of the many stocks that got away while i waited for a better entry point, and kept doing that over and over again. What about you? Any stocks that got away from you which still hurt ?


* Note that i technically am a MSFT shareholder since i actively invest in index funds via retirement accounts, so all is not lost.