What an eight-year-old brokerage statement says about asymmetry and why I stopped picking stocks.
I dug up a PDF I hadn’t opened in years. My 2018 DEGIRO tax report. I opened it expecting nostalgia. I got a slap.
A list of names. Thirteen stocks. A junk drawer: a Portuguese builder, an Italian football club, a Polish toll road, a French miner whose thesis I can’t even remember. And buried in that noise, two lines that hurt to read today.
NVIDIA. And one line below it, Micron.
It isn’t that I owned them and forgot. It’s worse. I scrolled down to the transaction log, and there it was, in black and white: NVIDIA, bought in March 2018. Sold nineteen days later. At a loss.
Not a big loss. A small one. Less than the price of a lunch.
I held NVIDIA for nineteen days and let it go for pocket change.
So I ran the uncomfortable experiment. I took the thirteen positions I was holding at the end of 2018 and worked out what each would be worth today if I had simply never touched them. No trading. No “managing.” No genius. Just doing nothing for seven and a half years.
Native-currency price returns; dividends and currency drift excluded. Reference point: end-2018, except NVIDIA, measured from its actual 2018 purchase. Micro-cap valuations are approximate, May 2026.
Look at the multiple column. That isn’t a portfolio. It’s a power law.
Two names out of thirteen: Micron, and a Dallas pawn-shop chain called DGSE, now Envela, produced roughly three-quarters of the entire result. The other eleven, combined, after seven years, handed back about the capital they started with. Eleven stocks. Seven years. Net zero.
And NVIDIA (the one I sold) would be worth more on its own today than those eleven names put together.
This is exactly what Taleb describes. In fat-tailed systems you do not win a little on many. You win almost everything on one or two, and the rest is noise, dead air, or zeros. Batla, Ymagis, B Communications: delisted, restructured, wiped out. That is the tail too.
The easy conclusion would be: concentrate on the winners and you get rich. And it’s true. Had I put that whole account into NVIDIA and Micron alone, we’d be talking about a different number and a different life.
But that conclusion is a trap. It hides two problems the chart doesn’t show.