Everybody wants a 100-bagger

Noone wants to hold when the stock drops 50%

Everybody wants a 100-bagger.

We love the stories. The legends. The charts that go bottom-left to top-right over decades.

We want to say:

• “I owned Amazon early.”

• “I bought Nvidia before AI took off.”

• “I owned Apple before the iPhone.”

But here’s the uncomfortable truth:

Almost nobody actually wants to live through what it takes to earn a 100-bagger.

The Price of Exceptional Returns Is Volatility

Every true long-term compounder looks obvious in hindsight.

In real time, they look like mistakes.

Amazon fell more than 90% after the dot-com bubble.

Netflix dropped 75%… twice (Now down -43% again btw).

Meta fell 76% in 2022 while the narrative was “Facebook is dead.”

Nvidia dropped 65% in 2018, long before it became the face of AI.

These weren’t broken businesses.

They were emotionally unbearable holds for investors.

The Market Doesn’t Reward Brilliance. It Rewards Endurance.

The market doesn’t hand out 100-baggers for being early.

It hands them out for being right and holding for the long-term.

That’s the part nobody posts on X.

No one brags about:

• Watching their position get cut in half

• Reading bearish headlines every day

• Questioning their own intelligence

• Underperforming the index for years

Yet that is the exact environment where the seeds of exceptional returns are planted.

Drawdowns Aren’t a Bug

They’re the Toll Booth

Large drawdowns are often the result of:

• Temporary growth slowdowns

• Cyclical effects

• Short-term narrative shifts

• The market confusing cyclicality with permanence

For true quality businesses, these moments are not warnings, but tests of conviction.

You Don’t Hold Through Drawdowns by Being “Strong”

This is important.

People like to frame long-term investing as a character trait:

“You just need diamond hands.”

That’s nonsense.

You don’t survive 50% drawdowns through willpower.

You survive them through structure.

• You understand the business model

• You know what actually drives long-term value

• You’ve separated price from narratives & noise

• You sized the position so you can sleep at night

Conviction isn’t confidence. Conviction is clarity.

Most Investors Quit Right Before the Payoff

This is the cruel irony.

The hardest period to hold a stock is often:

• After the first big drawdown

• Before fundamentals re-accelerate

• When the narrative is the most negative

That’s usually where future returns are the highest, and ownership is the lowest.

The market transfers wealth from:

“The impatient → the prepared”

Not from:

“The stupid → the smart”

The Real Question to Ask Yourself

Instead of asking:

“Can this be a 10x or 100x?”

Ask:

“Am I willing to hold this if it drops 50%, and nothing is fundamentally broken?”

If the answer is no:

• Your position is too big

• Your understanding is too shallow

• Or the business isn’t as high-quality as you think

There’s no shame in that.

But there is a cost.

Conclusion

Everybody wants the outcome.

Very few are willing to endure the process.

100-baggers don’t feel like genius decisions while you’re holding them.

They feel like lonely, uncomfortable, boring commitments to businesses most people have stopped believing in.

And that’s exactly why they work.

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