Investor Decision Making: It's Down 20% - Now What?

You've done the work, bought the stock, and now it's down 20%. Do you tell yourself it's now cheaper and buy more, or accept you got it wrong, take the loss, and move on? That decision, as Jeremy puts it, is the one that defines you as an investor.

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In this episode, Jeremy McKeown is joined by two friends of the pod: Substacker and author Rob Marstrand dialling in from Buenos Aires, and podcaster Mark Atkinson, this week broadcasting from Lancashire rather than his usual desert island. Together, they dig into a few everyday dilemmas of the DIY investor.

Drawing on the latest chapter of Rob's book, the conversation covers when to run winners and when to cut losers; why stop-losses belong to momentum traders rather than fundamentals-driven investors; and how to think about position sizing, sector and geographic diversification, and which parts of the market to simply leave alone. Rob explains his ranking system for weighting holdings by future potential, why he keeps a trading log to separate skill from luck, and the edge private investors hold over the professionals — permanent capital, patience, and the freedom to buy the crashes.

Along the way: the case for Diageo as an out-of-favour quality compounder, Terry Smith and the perils of a forced churner, and a detour into Argentina under Milei and what its decades-long decline might tell us about the UK's own trajectory.

And we nearly managed not to talk about the football.