About twice a year, or as needed, I go through my stock portfolio and decide what to sell and what to buy. It involves reading whatever I’ve missed since last time from two Motley Fool services, Rule Breakers and Stock Advisor. I look at the recommendations, and investing philosophy material that seems to provide new insights or just reconfirm and recommit older insights, and the odd bigger picture stuff, for instance, material that brings realizations as to bigger trends. (For example, AI and its implications, and stocks tying into the trend, or even stuff like how difficult it is turn gig economy based business, like Uber, Lyft, Fiverr into viable publicly traded companies, which confirms my idea to basically treat them skeptically and avoid buying them further.) (Historically, I had similar principles established, regarding China-based stocks, or similarly bio-tech stocks as a group, and have gotten better about recognizing the hype machine and how fallible we are as humans in our ability to predict the future and the future of individual stocks. Which means whether they will likely be a success or not and ties into the decision to buy a particular stock, now or not.)
Anyway, today I was reading about Crowdstrike. The Fool had added them to their “10 Foundational Stocks” and days later also added a buy recommendation.
Here’s the sentences in their write-up that most struck me:
“CrowdStrike has a multiyear growth runway from here and has a superior platform for threat detection and protection that we don't see getting disrupted anytime soon. The frequent introduction of new modules and technologies illustrates CrowdStrike's desire to self-disrupt before others catch up.” (9-28-23 “Crowdstrike Rejoining our Foundational Stocks”, by Tom Gardner and Team Everlasting.)
I really like that phrase. Self-disrupt. It means to shake things up, to divorce from orthodoxy or routine in an effort to grow. To invest in exploring change and then to change from within. A key factor being the “self” part. Meaning that it is voluntary, that we have a choice in the matter and we decide to commit to making a change.
Sometimes, we want change, and sometimes we don’t.
For instance, I hate the forced changes on simple stuff, like when Google decides to change its format, or when Windows decides we all need Windows 11, or basically any software company tells us that this is the new way things are to be interacted with, and we have no choice. Change foisted upon us that is disruptive and a distraction and counterproductive. Change in areas that were working fine and don’t really add that much value. Change in areas that are not a priority.
It's an old trope, lamenting the speed of change we are called upon to undergo as a matter of modern life. It is semi soul-crushing at times.
It makes it even harder or less likely that we face ourselves, and decide what the highest priorities are, and that we want to change in order to better pursue them.
Here’s to voluntary change. Pick wisely, and happy self-disrupting my friends.
Happy New Year!
-Hugh
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