RE: Congrates to ML ShareholdersThanks for the kind words, VENMan.
As to your prescient call to get into MOL (at around $1.10, I recall) congratulations! I did not join you because my primary goal has been, from the beginning, to attain compounded exponential capital gains. That is, to be sure, a lofty goal, and most observers believe that goal is unattainable. But the way I see things, that is the primary reason to be invested in Venture Exchange securities. And I am well on my way to having accomplished that: My gain in ML currently stands at 1,800%.
To one who adheres to that strategy, there is a little-understood rule of thumb says:. only abandon your position it the replacement candidate has merits that are 25% better than that what you currently hold. That is primarily due to the tax implications of both ends of any such transaction.
While it may well have been true that, at that particular moment in time, MOL probably fulfilled that criteria, I nevertheless found it too difficult to dump my ML in favor of MOL—and of course, the market has long since rectified the discrepancy in MOL’s value relative to ML.
What I ought to have done, of course, was to dump some of my other stocks in favor of MOL. But when I entertained that proposition, I realized that I would then have had 100% of my holdings in molybdenum stocks, due to my massively oversized position that I already held in ML. In retrospect that would have been fine, but six or eight months ago, there was plenty of discouragement to be found here, and elsewhere on the long-term prospects for molybdenum.
For the reasons outlined above, it can reasonably be expected the each of us will remain committed to our respective holdings. That is how it should be, and there’s no reason why we shouldn’t continue as friends.