135 - Our Biggest Investing Mistakes of 2025 And How They Sparked Process Upgrades

This episode is our yearly investing accountability report — the “Whoopsie Daisies” review where we openly break down the trades and decisions that didn’t go to plan.

We cover:

• Dividend suspensions and cuts that blindsided us (and what we do now when income goes to zero).
• Selling too early on winners and how we’re changing our  profit-taking rule so we stop prematurely ejecting from huge runners. (Last year's keep going up! WTF) 
• High-yield ETF experiments that didn’t  behave the way they should (and which YieldMax ETFs aren't absolute garbage). 
• Overpaying for great long-term holdings (UPS, LYB, TRMD) and how we use valuation, bands, and DCA to repair a bad entry without panic-selling.
• How we manage risk with a max position-size rule and why that one rule prevents a single holding from turning into a portfolio hostage situation.

This is our real process for how we navigate investing to reduce risk and keep compounding even when the market humbles us. 

***NOTE***

We are doing live streams on Thursday 12/18/2025 (today) and Friday 12/19/2025 at Noon EST on Our YouTube Channel to show where we are allocating our condo sale proceeds. We have $150,000 to invest. 

If you can't make it and have questions, drop them in the comments on this episode over on YouTube and then watch the replays (will post below when they're up). 

Thursday 12/18 Livestream --> watch here

Questions? Email Tim at debrine9@gmail.com

Want FREE weekly market updates, Tim's top 10 dividend picks, and our portfolio updates delivered right to your inbox? Subscribe to our email list.

Stay connected. Follow us on social!

**DISCLAIMER**
Ticker metrics change as markets and companies change, so always do your own research. The content in this podcast is based on personal experience and is for educational purposes, not financial advice. See full disclaimer here.

Episode music was created using Loudly.

Transcript

Welcome to roaming returns a podcast about generating a passive income with dividend stocks so you can secure your finances and liberate your life. 

This episode is our annual “Whoopsie Daisies” review — aka the trades we screwed up, the ones we sold too early, the dividend cuts that blindsided us, and the positions that still haunt us like a bad ex. 

But we’re not doing this for entertainment (well… maybe a little). We’re doing it for the process: like how we manage risk or pivot when the story changes. And the lessons, my god the lessons, that’ve forced new and improved strategy updates.

Let’s dig into the carnage.

All right guys, we are back and it's a very exciting week. We just closed on the house on Monday and we already got the check wire transferred into the account. So the Schwab account has a plus $152,000. Not all of that is going to go into investments. I have a couple credit cards to pay off and whatnot. What we're going to do this week is do two live streams, one with Tim investing part of that money into like the core portfolio. If I do this wrong, it's very bad. One, if I do. And the other, I was actually going to do it too. The first one. The second one. The second one is going to be us putting money into the high yielders, which is like, I don't think we're doing any actual yield max because yield max is- No, it's not going to be a yield max. I have a pretty good idea what I'm going to do with the first bulk of money on Thursday will be like for the main portfolio, like getting better dividend things. And then Friday will be the one where we put it into the income generator, which is a high yield ETF. And I have a pretty good idea where that's going. So if you wondered why I launched this episode early, I was trying to get this up to give everybody the heads up if they want to tune into the live streams for those two episodes. Thursday, we're going to do the core portfolio, like we said, noon. Is that what we decided? Noon? Noon o'clock. We're doing noon o'clock, Eastern time. Noon o'clock. Eastern time. So the market's in that like middle lull period. Because if you go from like 930 to 1130, it's crazy. It's really volatile. And then from like one to three, it's volatile. And I don't want to do it towards the end of the day. So we'll just do it at noon o'clock. And then Friday, we're doing the high yielders because Roundhill comes out with their list. And if you get in Friday, you get paid the following Tuesday. So Friday, we have to be in those by close of business. We're going to also do that one at noon o'clock. Yes? Yeah. Yes. OK. Sounds good. Also doing that one at noon o'clock. So Friday, Thursday and Friday, if you want to tune into either one of those. Two. If you guys have any questions and you know you cannot show up for the live stream, I'm going to put a link in the show notes that's going to have a go to one of our website, go to a page on our website where you can drop comments. No email required. If you have any questions that you want us to cover during the live stream, if you are listening to this after the live streams go live, you can still comment in that link or you can go straight to the YouTube videos. I will upload those after they actually post to this episode as well, that you can actually just go on YouTube. And every question we get on Thursday and Friday, we're going to do another one on Tuesday when I do the top ten. So we're shooting for Tuesday. So I'll answer the questions before I show you how I create that top ten. Yeah. So any other questions that get missed or get posted after we go live, we'll actually answer the following Tuesday. And then going forward each Tuesday, Tim's going to put together his top ten list so you can see the thought process behind the mind. You can jump on live with us. You can ask live questions, whatever you want. Those are going to be evening hours. So if you can't do during the day, we don't need to actually do that one during we haven't like come up with a time yet. So do you know what time you'd want to do it? Six, six, seven, seven. Sure. I don't care. Sometimes nine, six or seven p.m. Eastern standard time with that. So if you're like the European countries, I have no idea what Eastern when it comes to that British. I'm sure I'm sure they could figure that out on their own. But everything that you'll need is going to be linked in the show notes as it as it comes up. Populous wise, the replays will be available if you miss it. You do want to watch it. So that's fine. And if you don't know our YouTube channel to actually link, I'll make sure there's a link in the show notes for this episode. So this episode is going to be really fun. OK, so today's episode, with all that, what is that? Administrative nonsense is out of the way. It's officially gone. Today's episode is the what? Whoopsie daisies or WTF rethinking whichever. Oh, this is the whoopsie daisy episode. I don't know why I was thinking a 2026 preview. So basically we're doing what we did at the end of each year. Everything we screwed up on or had losses because we got out too early. And you'll see that there are gifts that just keep giving and ones that still haunt us from last year. Gifts that keep on giving. So without further ado, we're going to jump right into this. Obviously, like the first couple of like their carryovers from the previous years was Icon, IEP, Camping World, CWH, MPW, MPW, MPM, Medical Properties, like those three just keep on giving. So explain the thought process. So we lost significant amounts because at this point it doesn't really matter. No, no, no. But the point was we lost significant amounts and normally we would cut losses, but we were down so much that if we would have locked in losses, it would have been kind of a moot point that we just decided to see what would happen because it was possible that if the companies like turned around because like Icon still had high yields. MPW still had high yields. Like all three generate pretty good revenue. It's just a matter of... Camping World did not though. Camping World like cut its dividend completely. So that could turn into a growth return. So who the hell knows? They're all three like they're just, it's like the 70s pants are going to come back in style here soon. At some point they're going to come back into favor. So like I'm not too terribly concerned about them, but like the thought process, like even I'm on top of the news for the most part when it comes to earning reports, but like news outside of that, like I don't see it sometimes. And by the time I saw the news for those three, like the stock was already down like 12%. So at that point you're just like, you're, you're trying to, trying to sell into everybody abandoning ship and it's very difficult to sell. So I was just like, fuck it. We'll just, we'll just keep them to see what happens. Yeah. And panic selling is never good. And a lot of times see what happens with this panic dip. Sometimes they'll actually rebound the next day. That didn't happen with these couples. They still pay dividends. So we're still, we're still accruing shares throughout the years, but like it's been two or three years now that those have been just dog shit. So. But we will reiterate with IEP Icon specifically, we were over allocated in that one. And that one specifically is why we changed our overall strategy of only having 5% of our portfolio in a single stock. Yeah. Did we have any lessons from MPW? No, I'm, I'm comfortable being in camping world, being in all three of them. What lesson did we have from camping world? We probably should have cut camping world completely because they cut the dividend like they did. I think we did learn that lesson. And I think we cut other stocks. QVC is an extenuating circumstance because that's a preferred one, but we actually, that was actually on this year's list because I had a moment of clarity, but I ignored it. Do you want to jump right into that one and come back? We'll get, get to the list. Oh, QVC. Okay. Where the hell is it at? QVC is one that cut its dividend completely and it dropped like 80%. And that was one where we were like, okay, well we should have got out. But again, it's down so freaking much. So what happened was we bought this one in 2022, in November of 2022 for $40. It's a preferred share that, and it was, uh, at that point it was 60% on sale because it was preferred for a hundred dollars and we got it for $40 and it had a pretty good yield. It was like a 14 or 15% of the time. It was giving you $8 a year in yield. So it was pretty good. Um, what happened though was in, um, January of 2024 in the retirement, the conservative portfolio, the retirement one, I dumped 50% of it because the share price got up to 52 or $53. I was like, oh, I'm going to get, I'm going to get out of this because I don't really trust it that much. So my gut was telling me to get out of it. Yeah. But he didn't do it on ours for some reason. We discussed it and we decided to just let it roll. And then, um, it didn't turn out very well. Like they suspended their dividend, um, in, I want to say March, March or April, they suspended their dividends. So we only got $4 in dividends this year, but the last two we missed. And when they suspended their dividend, the stock just cratered, like this preferred share just cratered. And it's currently under $4 a share. So we're down like, what is that? 90%. So for this one, like, like I still like the methodology of actually finding a preferred share that was deeply discounted. I don't, I don't regret, uh, I don't regret anything other than not listening to my gut when I sold in January of 2024, where I got half out in the retirement portfolio. I should have taken at least half out in the, um, in the main portfolio, but I didn't. And so now we are just sitting around with seeing what happens because the, uh, the other part about this being a preferred share, it's a cumulative preferred meeting. If QVC ever does turn their drip back or turn their dividends back on or bring them back, we will get back pay on everything that has been missed during that timeframe. But the pro the probability of that, like there's two ways this could go. One way is QVC turns our business around and everything's hunky-dory and they were, um, they resumed dividends or the other probability is it just goes to zero. And I'm pretty, I'm, I'm inclined to believe this one's probably going to go to zero. But at this point, we're down so much that I kind of want to see what happens. Cause it would be freaking hilarious if it actually did do that cumulative return. So we kind of want that as like a sensationalist story. And the reason this one falls into 2025 instead of 2024 is because I had the suspicion for a while to sell this. And the last time I had, this was when I got the $2 dividend in quarter one. I was like, well, I mean, if I sell it now, it's only like a 30 or 40% loss. And I just, I ignore my gut like five or six different times. Like, I know you're not supposed to trade with your gut, but like my gut is saying, Hey dude, you probably want to get out of this piece of shit. I didn't listen to it. So like, that's, that's a whoopsie, but whatever. All right. So we'll just, we discussed that one. Cause it was relevant to those other two we're talking about. So I would like to say like, when I watch a lot of, um, investing stuff and I a lot of investing stuff and I never, um, see people do this. So this is like a rare thing. I think, I don't know. I don't know how many, I don't know how many people do this where they're like, Hey, we're giving you information and like, uh, and recommendations for investing, but here's where we fucked up. Anyway, 2025, uh, BITO, B I T O. I sold on January 29th of this year at $24 and 82 cents. It's a Bitcoin futures. Okay. So we went back and forth on this Bitcoin thing. Cause Tim was trying to figure out the right Bitcoin strategy that wasn't buying Bitcoin directly. Right? You went BITO, YBTC and some other, IBIT was another one. And then I forget exactly how you decided on what to do with what, but I remember you had something and then you got rid of, is this the one that you had and decided to get rid of? This is the one that I sold for, when we dumped BITO in January, we actually got about, it was, I think it was a 98% return. So it's not the end of the world, but it actually hit $34 in the summer. So I could have had another 40% on this one. So this is one of those instances where I sold too early. But I think if you understood that back strategy with what I did with this one, I took BITO, I took the proceeds from BITO and I split it equally. I put half into IBIT and half into YBTC to see which one would do better. And we'll get to IBIT in a second because that's number two on the list of stuff I fucked up on. I was going to say these two are coupled. But like, I am super big on the blockchain and I don't know why I sold BITO. I don't recall the exact reason. I think I just, because I got a hundred percent gain. So like, well, so this is another instance where like. I thought it was due to something it was holding. No, this is a Bitcoin futures. I'm not big. I'd rather have exposure to Bitcoin as opposed to futures. That was what it was. That was what it was. You said you'd rather have direct exposure. But at the same time, this is another instance where like, instead of selling something for a hundred percent, why not just take your initial investment out? So you're literally down zero money and whatever happens happens. So I've been, I've gotten like a lot better about that. We've gotten that message quite a few times. Throughout 2025. Quite a few times from a lot of these like ouchies, because it's like, it does really suck when you sell something and you saw it continue to run. And the way to prevent that is to take all your initial money off the table. So you have zero risk and to just let it run. The very last one to share with you, I had to write down. I'll show you. It's the gift that keeps on giving. And that's one that. At the end. So Bitto and iBit are connected. So the second one is iBit. I sold iBit on April 1st of this year at $47.83. This one was an experiment. Like we took the Bitto proceeds and we put half into iBit and half into YBTC. iBit is, I think it's part of, I think it holds shares in something else that holds Bitcoin. I don't remember exactly. Yeah, there's another intermediary. That was the other reason you weren't as sold on this one. Whereas YBTC is, I think there's actual Bitcoin in their cluster. In their holdings that they're doing options one on. But while I held, we held iBit for over two months and it didn't do anything. And now YBTC was up about 15% in the same timeframe. So I sold this one and put everything into YBTC. The problem with this is iBit hit $70 this year in October. So again. So you took a 10% loss and lost out on like another 47%? And I missed out on 47% more appreciation. This is a perfect illustration of. Him seeing something and not waiting long enough for it to come to fruition. I have patience. That's a common theme for him. There are instances where you have to be patient with things. And like, I have a problem with that because I'm kind of just like, ah, let's do it now. This isn't working fast enough. This isn't coming to fruition fast enough. It's not a FOMO thing as much. It's like, I don't like to see money, not generating money. And iBit didn't generate anything. So like, even if I sold it at $70 a year, it would have been a 47%, 47% price appreciation. But then I didn't make anything for like 10 months. I like my money to be making money. Yeah. So he would have sold, if he wasn't in the first few months, he probably went in three, four, five. I would have sold at some point. Because how long did it take to finally hit 70? Did it just spike at the end? It went in October. Oh yeah. He would have never made it. He would have never made it. Yeah. Especially since he originally went into this with the experiment. That's the problem. The problem with this one is I had the impatience of, I want this to do what it's supposed to be doing. I'm looking at YBTC, which is actually generating dividends and it's up 15%. Why would I not put all my money into YBTC? Because it's basically, it has a better total return. And I'm getting, at that point it was monthly, but now it's weekly. I'm getting weekly dividends in it. So that was the two things, impatience. And I just have a disdain for my money not making money. I understand capital gains are still making money, but to me, that's not the same as making money every month. That's paper. That's paper returns. That's not realized, actualized gains, whatever they call it. My question now is though, do you regret making that decision? I don't know what you have in here is us making for YBTC. I like YBTC. I really like YBTC. Okay. So that wasn't necessarily a regret. That was just like a loss. It was just a 40, 70, 50% loss. I would actually be curious to see the numbers and the comparison. Did we actually make the same amount in YBTC with the changeover? We're up like 69% in YBTC. So it's about comparable. It's about comparable. Yeah. Okay. So those ones don't have a lot of like emotional regret going on. Next one's a real fuck, but this one I'm still confused about. I don't even understand how this is possible, but I bought Fiat, F-I-A-T on 4-2. Which is the yield max short of coin. This is part of an experiment because we held Coney. I've held Coney for like over two years now. Before we got into Fiat. And I was like, well, if I can actually just get the inverse side where I can get this short side of Coinbase while I'm holding the long side in Coinbase, maybe they should move no matter what direction Coinbase heads, I should see good results or even a higher dividends or something like that. But that's not even remotely what happened with Fiat. Both Coney and Fiat have basically traded down in 2025. Which is ridiculous. Coney is down 57% year-to-date and Fiat is down 67%. So that doesn't even make sense. I don't know how the fuck it's even possible. Because Fiat should be making more money. Yeah, if Coney is down 57, Fiat should at least be up like 10 or 17 at the bare minimum. So this is one of those instances where yield max ETFs kind of really, truly suck. Bad taste in the mouth and just WTF. Like it doesn't do at all what it's supposed to be doing. So anyway, we are down 74% in this. You did put a lot into this though, didn't you? It's like $750. Yeah. So we're down 74% in this failed experience. But I guess the good news is I do these dumb fucking experiments. So you guys don't have to. Right? Hopefully you didn't follow that one during the Cony experiment. Like, what? this is what we're doing. Well, the ironic part is in the same breath, yield max has dips, which is the NVDY. Inverse. And that one has done better. Actually, that one was going pretty much side-by-side. Because you bought that one as well, didn't you? Yeah, we bought that one too. Like side-by-side. So I also bought the Tesla one. I don't remember what it's called. But that one actually is not as bad. So this one just seems to be in particular. So whoever's managing Cony and whoever's managing Fiat, clearly. I'm not going to say that they're great. Dips wasn't doing great stuff. But it's like when NVIDIA went down, Dips went up. Yeah, it kept to the short strategy. And when Tesla went down, the short of Tesla went up. So it kept to what options generally do whenever these things happen. That's why you take a short position. Right. Because when the market goes down, you make money off it. It's not like, hey, we're both just going to jump off a cliff with a fucking anchor around our feet and just sink. To Davey Jones Locker. Yeah. So that one's a really bad one. Yeah. So I'm thankful we didn't do a lot of money into that one. But I remember talking on the podcast, like, I wonder. I wonder. I wonder. So I did all three of them at the same time. The Tesla one and the NVIDIA one did fine, but the Coney one did not. Okay. The fourth one, because we just covered QVCGP, which is the third one. So the fourth one was OGN. We had this in the retirement account. This is that gynecology medical one? It's a medical stock for female stuff like gynecology and uteruses and things of that nature. Not boobs. I don't think it's much boobs, but. Probably not. We bought that. And we bought it in the beginning of 2024. We sold this one on 6-9-2025 right after their earnings, where they declared they were cutting the dividend from 28 cents down to 2 cents. They did it. They pulled a camping world here, where they just cut the dividend by like 80 some percent. The financials, because I was actually looking through the financials in this one. Nothing showed that they weren't a dividend cut. They had some debt they took on. But the reason they cut the dividend was to pay down the debt. So the debt was not really that bad. This one caught me completely off guard. So I tried to sell this one when the dividend cut announcement was made. But the drop was far too much. It literally dropped like down under $10. And because the earnings took place before the market opened by the time that the market even opened, it was at like $9. It was already down like 30%. So it took a couple of weeks, but I was actually able to sell it for $10, which wasn't great. But whatever, we lost 50% here. But that is part of the risk. That's why they always have that disclaimer, like past whatever is not- Past results are not indicative of future whatever. There's always risk in everything. If this one was a dividend, I think it was like 15 years of dividend growth. Yeah, and that's the thing. Like this happens. Triple M even did like a freaking dividend cut after 50 years status. So again, this should have been one of the safer ones. But again, safety is- So sometimes you lose money in the market. Yeah, sometimes you lose money even with the safe bets. Sometimes you cannot account for everything. You just can't predict. You lose money. Shit happens. And then again, that's where your macros and your economic climate can sometimes, I guess, throw monkey wrenches. It just happens. So getting in at a good purchase price, like an entry price- Helps you hedge your risk. Is ideal. But like even then, I got this one at a pretty good price compared to where it was, like historically, and then we still lost about 50% in this one. And I imagine at some point it will turn around. So those are the people who got stuck in it could very well have a turnaround later. You're still getting a dividend. I mean, two cents. Whoop-dee-doo, Basil. Yeah, it's just like camping world. Like camping world still hasn't even like- Camping worlds is- How much are we still down in that? 2,000. What percent? Do we know? 40. We're still down 40% in that? 40% around there somewhere. Fun stuff, fun stuff. Okay, next one. That was a whoopsie daisy. The reason this was a whoopsie daisy is really convoluted. So I hope you can follow my thought process. I thought this was a pretty good one. Interesting. SBLK. It's a shipping stock. We bought this one in January of 2023 in the retirement account. And when you invest in shipping stocks, like you basically come to expect variable dividends, sometimes no dividends, whatever. We sold half our position in this one because of the variable dividend. So in 2023, when we held this, we collected $1.57 per share for the year. And in 2024, we collected $2.50 per share. For the year. For the year. So everything was awesome. And then 2025, the dividends came out as quarter one was nine cents, quarter two was five cents, quarter three was five cents, and quarter four was 11 cents. So you were making 30 cents per share for the year, which is 88% difference between 2024 and 2025. That's crazy. And since SBLK was up 35% year to date, we sold half of our position as like we weren't making shit on it. Like we're just going to keep half of it in there. I think we're about 85% recouped. So like I could probably sell the other 15% at some point and just whatever happens, happens with this one, whatever. We ended up losing about 5% on the half we sold, but the real whoopsie was not... I don't even know how you can like... Predict it. Read the financials and say, hey, I understand that this one made $2.50 last year, but you're going to get like 50 cents this year. You can't predict like what shipping stocks happen. So like if anybody listened to me, I do apologize because that was pretty bad. It happened to us too, we suffered through it. You're still up 35% even with no... You're not getting any drip shares and shit like that. So it is kind of gross, but whatever. Whoopsie. Number five, YMAG. Another Yieldmax glorious ETF. Oh my God, like what is it with them? They suck. And so in April, I decided to try the Yieldmax Magnificent 7 ETF called YMAG. Just for shits and giggles. Much like 85% of all the other Yieldmax offerings, this one, it was a piece of shit as well. Yeah. And in the defense of the ETF, we did buy this like right before the tariff tantrum, where everything dropped like 12 or 15%. But even if you exclude all that crap and do the tariffs and just look at the last six months return of this ETF, you'll see it's down 10%. Like pretty much every other Yieldmax offering, you're at the mercy of the dividend being more than the NAVIC line. That's kind of how these are operating. Like, so say like in October, YMAG went down 70 cents. What generally happens is they'll pay you like 75 cents. You're up 5 cents in a month. That was real shit for the NAV decline. That's kind of how the Yieldmax does their things from what I'm seeing. So you're breakeven, but you never get your initial back, right? So I figured the Magnificent 7 should provide some returns until I saw the covered call and YMAG was actually Yieldmax ETF. So like they actually don't hold anything or even like synthetic positions in the Magnificent 7. What they're actually doing is they're writing options on the Yieldmax ETFs that cover the Magnificent 7. Wait, wait, wait. Did you know that before? No, I didn't. So like instead of actually holding or doing the synthetic position in NVIDIA, you're basically getting NVDY. And rather than the synthetic position in Tesla, you're getting TSLY. So you're getting like, they basically just- So it's a synthetic of a synthetic. No, it's they hold shares of the synthetic. Synthetic. But they don't trade options on those? I don't know what the hell they do. I really don't know what they do. So I would say the biggest takeaway of this one- This one was a clusterfuck. Yeah, this one is that we didn't look at what they actually hold. Is that the big fuck up here? I mean, like I did, but I didn't think it would be a big deal. But like what happened was that when they're only holding seven shitty ETFs and one of them has a really bad year like TSLY, it really fucks the whole entire thing up. So we lost 30% in this experiment. Actually, that's not too terrible considering. And as of now, there's literally only like a handful of Yieldmax things that I would recommend with NVDY being one, PLTY being the second, GXY being the third, CHPY being the fourth, GPTY being the fifth, LFGY being the sixth, BIGY being the seventh, RNTY being the eighth, and SOXY being the ninth. Soxy, nice. 90 out of like over 60 ETFs. NVIDIA- Nine of 60. The NVIDIA one, the Palantir one are synthetic calls on those. GDXP is a gold miners one. That one, they write options on what they hold. So like the GDXP, the CHPY, the GPTY, LFGY, BIGY, and RNTY, they all hold what they're writing the options on. So they're kind of like big- Oh, so it's kind of like a round hill. It's kind of like a round hill thing. GDXY is gold miners. CHPY is microchips. GPTY is GPT. LFGY is cryptocurrency. BIGY, I forget. I don't, don't hate me. I forget what that is. RNTY I know is real estate. And SOXY is, I believe that is- Come on. What did I already say? Microchips? Yeah, CHPY. I don't know then. Like, so let's look it up. Hold on one sec. We'll look up BIGY and SOXY. Biggie, Biggie, Biggie Smalls. It's probably like Puff Daddy's frigging thing. Oh, okay. So target 12, big 50 options. So they basically just, BIGY, they just pick 12 big, like large cap companies and write options on them. No rhyme or reason, I would imagine. Including the Tarjay, which everybody hates right now. Semiconductors, SOXY. SOXY is semiconductors 12. They take the 12 semiconductor stocks and write options on them. I think that is SOXY. So nine out of 60, again, they're just awful. Just awful. I, um, they better step their game up or they're going to just look- Roundhill's going to take it. Roundhill and Defiance and Rex Share. Yeah, they're all going to take everything. So that was number, I don't know, six. I don't, I don't know. Doesn't matter, next one. Next three are lumped together. Do tell. A UPS, LYB and TRMD. I lumped these three together because I made the same error on each. All three will be in the portfolio for long-term. So it's not that I didn't want them. But it's a perfect example of not paying too much for a good investment. So let's dig into the numbers. UPS, we bought in November of 2024 and we overpaid by about 25 to 30%. We bought it at $126. Had I waited a few months, I could have got this one around $80. Was the, were the metrics saying that $126 was undervalued? Yeah. Okay, would you have known this? There was some- Signs? Some grumbling in the earnings. But I would, at the same time, I could have got it at $80, but I would have missed out in $4.91 per share and dividends. But in my case, in this case, getting UPS at 80 would have been much better than getting like at 126 with three dividend payments that came out to be about three drip shares for the most part. Yeah. So I only gained three shares by losing like 30%. That's not a good trade off. Not worth it. LYB is another prime example. I bought this one in June of this year. I overpaid by about 20 to 25% when I bought it at $54. Had I waited for four or five months, I could have got this at $42. I would have missed out on 274 in dividends per share, which came out to, again, about three drip shares. But again, I think getting it at 42 instead of 54 would have been much better than having those three additional shares. So again, did the metrics show any of that potentially on the horizon? This one, I don't think you did. This one is hit or miss. There's some experts and financiers say this will be fine in like three to five years, and other ones are saying this one's going to just be a shit one. That's not what I asked, but okay. The metrics, there's some metrics like- No, before, did you know it was going to go down? No. I mean, I had an idea. It was down like 20% when I bought it for the year. Okay. It's one of those where I'm doing the valuation thing. UPS was down like 25% when I bought it. I was like, oh, it's down 25%. It's generating billions of dollars in revenue. That seems like a good entry price, but then it wasn't. I missed it by about 20 to 25 to 30%. Same with LYB. LYB was down about 25% when we got into it in June, and it still dropped further than that. Okay. The third one is TRMD. We bought this one in August of 2024, and I really fucked up this one. I overpaid by about 40 to 50%. I bought this at $38. Had I waited four months, I could have had this at $18. Had I done that, I would have missed out on $3 per share in dividends, which came out to 12 drip shares. Saving 40% per share would have been more than worth the wait in this case. Again, was that obvious in the metrics? I'm guessing not if you got it- No, because it's an oil stock. That one's at mercy to the manipulation of the crude oil. Okay. This is a perfect time to just drop this little note here. These, we got in at the wrong time. It happens, but we did want the stocks, and they went down further. This is a prime example of when you do dollar cost averaging. You don't put all of your money into a basket, or you double down as the price goes down. That's my thing down there. Oh, I didn't look at your thing down there. The reason that I think these are oopsies is because in each of these cases, within a couple of months, you were already behind the eight ball. With EPS, you were down 30% already. You're starting 30% lower than you should. LYB, you're starting 20% lower. TRMD, you're starting about 50% lower than you should be. You're basically working uphill, pretty much right off the bat. It's going to take probably a year or two to actually recoup those losses in EPS and LYB, but you'll be gaining- Unless you lower your cost average. You'll be gaining a lot of drip shares, and a perfect example of overpaying for good companies, and the prime examples of investments to dollar cost average end when this happens. When you find a good company, and you just miss the entry price, you just dollar cost average. We did that in all three of these positions. We brought the dollar cost average down, and UPS is currently a cost basis of 115, so we've reduced that by $11. LYB is 52, we got it $2 cheaper, and TRMD is 29, we got it $9 cheaper just by picking up a few shares here and there when we have cash laying around to dollar cost average end. But even though the metric said he used the right strategy where he got in, he saw that it was down, it was undervalued, imagine if you wouldn't have had that valuation check before getting in, and you got in at the highs, and you had those bigger losses. That would have been like, god damn. The camping world, all over again. All over again, but at least they have dividends, so you can dollar cost down. So the next one is IIPR, I've had this one for two years in both portfolios, I like it, and it's going to turn around, we'll discuss that why in a second. We bought this in 12 of 2023 at $98 in the retirement portfolio, and everything was awesome for almost a full year. IIPR was up about 36% in those 11 months, then their quarter four earnings came out where there was a mention of tenant defaults, and everyone went crazy. Freaked out. Everything still looked good in the financials, but the price dropped from $133 to $105 within like a couple weeks because there was tenants defaulting. Panic, yeah. Since everything looked good, and we were still up 7% even after that huge drop, I just let it ride. We did take some profits, I did take some money out, but not near enough, but we still had over 80% of our initial investment invested. Since that earnings report in Q4 of 2024, though, this one has fallen all the way down to $45. Yikes. And I had the opportunity where I could have, when I saw the tenants defaulting, I could have recouped all of my initial investments instead of about 20%, I would have saved so much loss, like we're down 54% to be exact. Another case, go with your gut, because obviously I thought there was something wrong because I was taking money, like I was taking shares off the table of a position where we were up in. Did this have a similar pattern as MPW, with the tenants defaulting? No, not really. MPW cut their dividend because of the tenants defaulting, so that seemed a bit more serious. This one actually increased their dividend. Oh, I bet you that was a counter move, though. That doesn't actually make sense, though, does it? Well, it still generated a lot of money. Oh, okay. So they still make enough to cover, like for the most part, like I think three out of four earnings they actually made enough to cover their dividend. So they raised the dividend in this one, whereas MPW's- Hopefully to keep the stock price from falling, I assume, but it didn't work. MPW slashed their dividend. This one will get a huge boost from the decriminalization of weed, which is going to go a long way towards recouping all losses. I think this huge whoopsie, though, actually within like two years will be actually a huge win. I do believe that. Are you going to put more money into buying shares at the lower cost? I can't because it'll actually bump us above the 5% threshold. That was what I was going to ask. We're down 19% in the- Are you going to put drip on? In the Vanning? Oh, yeah. Okay. In the Vanning portfolio since 12-24, but like, yeah, I double dipped in this one. I bought it in the retirement portfolio at like 90-some dollars, and it was all great. And then like when it really started falling, I got it for like $58 in the van life portfolio. I was like, oh, it's dropped far enough, I'm going to get it in the van life portfolio. So we're down both in both portfolios. But again, I think this one's going to be just fine like in the long run. So if you're in it, just turn the drip on and sit back and ignore all the chatter that's coming out about tenants defaulting. I do agree with the decriminalization thing. Because the tenants aren't actually defaulting anymore. They actually restructured everything to get rid of the defaults. Plus the decriminalizing of weed means that there's going to be more people wanting to get into the cannabis sector. So they'll actually be able to rent out all their space. That's just my two cents. Okay, next one, ABR. I've actually had ABR since 5-23 in the retirement portfolio and 11-22 in the van life portfolio. We've had this one forever, and it's been awesome. Earnings have generally been decent to great until quarter three in October of this year. In those earnings, there was a 30% miss on revenue, which isn't great. But to compound their problem, there was an increase in loan delinquencies as well. ABR basically said in the earnings call that the tenants causing the problems will be resolved by quarter two of 2026 and that this is the bottom of the cycle. And I would imagine as a show that they're serious about that. There's been heavy insider buying in ABR at this low price. And insiders generally only buy when they know they're going to make money or they know information that other people don't know. This is one to monitor moving forward though as another dividend cut. The dividend was cut from 43 cents to 30 cents this year. Another dividend cut might be necessary. They might bring it down to 20 cents or 25 cents, whatever. I don't care. This is probably one that will hold forever. We are currently, even in ABR, we did buy it for $11 in 2023, but I've been dollar cost averaging the shit out of this one because this one actually traded in a band where you're actually able to, okay, dividends paid, it's a good time to take it in drip shares. Oh, dividends paid, it's a good time to take it in cash, wait for it to fall, and then buy more shares. So the dollar cost averaging, we're doing really well on this one. I think it's $9 is what our dollar cost averaging is in this one. That's hilarious. Our cost basis. I've turned the drip on and off throughout the years in this one. What's it currently at? It's at $9. $9. Did we actually dollar cost average down to breakeven plus dividends? Nice. This is a prime example of ... So if you were in this one and you didn't dollar cost average or you didn't turn your drip on and off or any of that stuff, you're down a lot. It's down 30% year to date, so I'm sorry if you're in this one that you did that. But this is a prime example of why we always discuss just not leaving the drip on all the time. Sometimes you can actually identify a pattern or a band that it trades in. Yeah, when they have that channel. You really do not want to invest when it's at its top and you want to get in when it's at its bottom. Just continue to bring your dollar down to increase your dividends that way. Sometimes we'll get a dividend in our ABR and it literally just takes an initial investment off the table. I don't do anything with it. Other times I'll get cash and I'll buy more shares. Other times the drip's on. It's just a matter of knowing what you're investing in. It's much easier if you have, say, 12 stocks. You can just, okay, this one trades in this range. It's easier. We have like 80 stocks in the two portfolios, so I can't get them all all the time. They're not all different though. But this is a prime example of don't just leave your drip on because you would have been fucked. You probably would have been down more than 30% if you had your drip on the entire time. The very last one from this year was NEP. It's not even called that anymore. It's like XIFR. No, they changed it. Wasn't this coupled with NEE? Yeah, it was NEE. NEE basically spun off their renewable energy portion of their business into NEP. We bought it for $29 in April of 2024 and everything was going along whatever. We were down like 30%, but we were collecting a shit ton of income. Then their quarter four earnings came out on January 28th of this year. The dividend wasn't cut. It was like they basically just got rid of it altogether. Didn't suspend it. Didn't cut it. They just said, we're no longer paying dividends. So I sold that day. This is when I sold. I'm not even taking a chance. I just sold that day. So we took a 57% loss on this stock and it basically cratered from that point on. It went from 18 down to 10 on the day we sold it. But it would have been much worse because had you been dripping, I never had the drip on this one. I always was collecting cash and it's still bad. It's like $8 now and it's XIFR. It's just a complete waste. I messed up on that one. I thought, I think looking back, I probably should have sold right after the election in 2024. Just sold everything. Because of the oil, baby oil. Drill, baby drill crap. So this one's one where the macro trend could probably could have saved a 40% loss or something like that had you just sold it right after the trend. So this is one where our personal bias of renewable energy actually came into play. Okay. And then I have three more that I have to write down. I don't know why you have these on paper. Okay. You guys ready for these? Why are these additional? These are ones that I just still pissed about. Okay. So these are ones that we didn't have any vested interest in in 2025, but we did the year before and we checked in on them to see if maybe they came back down to earth and nope. So GEO. GEO is one that we used to talk about in the email a lot and I think we may have mentioned it once or twice in the podcast. It's prison privatization. Basically, a lot of times the county or the state runs the prisons, but like with GEO and there's a couple other out there, they actually are private companies that own prisons and they do all this stuff. We were in this one, sold it at $8.74, it hit $35.62 in January of this year, which is 308% more. Did we have a gain in that one? Yeah. We had a win, but we left. It was like 12% so we left 308% on the table. We had 998 shares in that one. We could have had a lot of money. Jesus. All right. I don't know what. So that's 1,000. So we made like $35,000, $36,000 as opposed to $1,200 or whatever we made. $36,000? We had 1,000 shares at $35.62. These are the fun ones. These are the ones you look back and say, what the fuck? Who was smoking crack this day? How many shares? 988? 998. Times 35? $35.62. Yeah, $35.5. Are you freaking kidding me? $1,200? Did that? Oh, man. And we missed out like $20,000. Oh, my God. The second one was in the retirement account. I brought this one up last year and I'm still pretty pissed about it. Iron Mountain. We had 250 shares of Iron Mountain, which basically are data centers. They collect data and they safekeep data. I thought Iron Mountain was a food chain. No, we sold that one. It's data. It's all data. Oh, okay. We sold that one for $32.50 at a pretty big profit. I think we made, I want to say 75% when we sold it at $32.50. That one made it all the way up to $120 in November of last year. It still trades at like $90 a share currently. So, that's 269% that I missed out on there. At the $90 right now of current, we'd have $22,500. Yeah, we missed out on $14,000 about there in that one. And the last one is the one that keeps on giving. This one is the worst loser from last year. And it is like, oh my God. So, we lost 700% last year. 700% on this one, right? We missed out on 700%. And is that total in addition to? The current price is $53. So, this year we had another. Rocket Lab. I actually, in my retirement, my IRA, I bought a bunch of shares of Rocket Lab. Oh my God. Not a bunch. It was like 15 shares. But then I got out when I was up 100%. I sold when I got out. Basically, I got 100%. Again, you'd think I would learn. I got 100%. I was like, oh, I'm up 100%. I sold it. Just liquidated everything. Well, that fucker's currently at $53. So, it's 1,306% higher than it was. So, last year we were at 700% loss. And we just lost 13. So, it went up over 600% this year. So, in the last 20 months, this one's up over 1,300%. Moral of the story here. And same thing even with what we were talking about on a couple of the other ones. I can't remember which one you said. When you hit that 100% return, take your initial out and let it ride. That way you have no risk on the table. If it goes to zero, it doesn't matter. But if it hits one of these 1,300% gains. So, what did we do before? So, in the retirement account, we learned with Triple M. We got 100%. We took our initial investment out. Stillwater, SBSW, I got my 100%. Took my initial out. And that one's up 260%. SoFi, I'm up. Took my initial out. We're up 280%. Triple M's 160%. You already said that one. Yeah, it's 160%. Palantir, we took our initial out. We're up 800% in Palantir. Nice. So, I'm good at picking the growth stocks. It's just my problem is the sell part. The sell point. I used to liquidate everything. But now we've tweaked that to where we just take the initial out. And we just let whatever happens, happens. Because at that point, it's not my money. Because even your research from years ago, we got out of stuff. And they ran. He picks them right. A lot of them right. We just got to figure out how to get away from the QVCs. QVC was a preferred. I never would have thought that. I never would. But you know what? We just got into a new preferred. And I was like, Tim, is this QVC all over again? It's not. Let's see what happens. In the email. I still feel like QVC was sketchy just because of what it was. The old people shopping channel? Last week's email, we got in to DLR. DLR has a preferred. It's preferred L. What's the company though? DLR. It's the data centers. Okay. So it's not in old people's shopping network. The reason why is because DLR costs $160 and the preferred share is at $20. And so the preferred share is $5 undervalued. And you're collecting a 6.5% dividend while you're waiting on that. I don't think DLR is going anywhere. It's current stock is at $165. And it yields like 2%. So I'm getting three times the return. Plus I can pick up eight times the shares for the same price. But it was the one that we shouldn't have sold completely out of. We should have just took it off the table. So the biggest takeaways are if you have one that has 100% return, take it off the table and let the rest of it ride. That way you're taking all the risk off. That was like the biggest takeaway. And then you have if you get in at the wrong price, even if it's a good dividend aristocrat type deal. Which happens a lot more. Which happens a lot more than you realize. You do always try to get in with it depreciated. But if it depreciates more, then you dollar cost average down. So you reduce your buy in price. And going into 2026 because there's going to be like a lot of volatility in the market. So you're going to see like you can get into really good companies. And within like a month or two, you're like 20% down. You might as well just dump more money into it. And then when you have band trading, you should always be doing that cycling of drip. If you got the ones that do the bands, always do that cycling of drip. I don't think we could have predicted the OGN. Do we have any learning lessons on that? Or were those three big main learning lessons? The OGN had debt. So that's why whenever I look at my top 10 chart, I always look at the debt to make sure that it's not... The other big one for him is like going against his gut. His gut is usually on point. It's not the emotions. And he tries to like talk himself out of it with logic a lot of times. But the gut usually is the reigning truth like with... What was it? And then NEP was that macro that I think we should have put more weight into. And I kind of feel that way about Target with the DDI and the... Whatever the hell it is. And the... What the fuck was the other one? Target's fine. I don't know what you're worried about. I can't remember. It'll come to me at some point. It'll be like a huge sideliner. But we're not worried about the pot one. Again, that's weird sentiment news stuff. Some of these are just volatile. Same thing with the shipping stock. So it's one of those things where it's like it is really an art. Well, that's one thing you learn if you go back up to Starbuck when we talked about Starbuck, SBLK. Because... And I did the same thing with ABR. The current macro trend is dictating something that I'm not comfortable with. But I don't want to take everything out. So I just take half out. So even if this went to zero, I'm only losing... If Starbuck went to zero, which it wouldn't, but let's just say hypothetically it went to zero, I would be losing $2,000 instead of $4,000. Because I already got $2,000 out of it by taking half my... Are you okay with that? Yeah. Okay. So that's... ABR is another one where I just took... We had $4,000 and now we have $2,000. Because I took half of it out when ABR did their earnings. And I was like, I'm not entirely sure. I like the company enough to actually keep stock into it. So you can always... And that's what happens in the last week. What normally happens in the last week of December is a lot of the institutional investors will just look at what their losers are and they'll just liquidate or sell half their shares or whatever. You can always reduce your initial investment by taking money off the table. And then you can add back in as the financial strength or as things get better. But me, I'm not going to add any money into ABR and I'm not going to put any money into Starbuck. I'm just going to let whatever happens, what happens with what I have left in it. I will say a lot of allocation rebalancing strategies at the end of the year talk about looking at your portfolio. And if your thing was 5% across all stocks or whatever, or sectors, whatever, they would tell you to actually add to the ones that are down in proportion. I don't think that's always a blind good idea. You'd probably get better results if you actually evaluate each thing on a case-by-case basis to check the macros, to check the valuations. Yes, it is more work. But is it worth the potential? ASTS, we took out our initial investment too, so that's all profit now. I was going to say, I thought it was one of the Starlink ones, related ones. Yes, ASTS. We have a bunch of growth stocks where we've actually recouped our initial investment. Now everything left over is just profit, doing what profit does. Yes, hopefully we'll have examples of where we didn't have Rocket Labs and those three, we actually hit them, which you just rattled off a whole bunch. So we are learning. And this is the whole point. Yes, it's hard to get into investing because of the fear factor, but if you do it with mitigating as much risk as possible and learning how to pivot and learn as you go, you become more resilient, you start having more wins consistently, and you start reducing your risk. You learn, you adapt, you shift. It's just the nature of the beast. But I do think these are fun for people to look at and be like, wow, this guy's an idiot. It is fun. We can look dumb, but we have a lot of freaking hit out the parkers. What did you say, 800%? Palantir. And we have a lot of growth stocks that I do believe in the next five years are going to be at least 800%. Hopefully that helps you guys see that we are not infallible and we basically live what we preach and we roll with the punches. And we learn and we iterate our process on a regular basis. So if you do want the best strategy, keep up with us in the current time as opposed to all of the previous episodes because we're always learning, we're always iterating. And on that note... One thing I would mention that I didn't mention when you're going through the list is you have to make the decision because QVC did it this year. And there was one or two other ones where when they cut the dividend to zero, you have to make the determination at that point. Is recouping any money worth... That wasn't completely eradicated. I'm talking about when they cut the dividend to zero. NEP. NEP. So NEP and QVC both did that. And you have to make the determination then and there, like, am I willing to take the loss because you're not going to get a dividend. I highly doubt you're getting a dividend from QVC and I know you're not getting one for NEP. So then you have to make the determination, okay, look, I'm going to be taking like a 40 or 50 or 60% loss. Is it worth it to get this cash to put in something else so I can start growing the cash or do I just... Yeah, that's where you have to do that evaluation where it's like, okay, we are a dividend first, but there are growth stocks, but... I'm under the belief that if they cut the dividend to zero, you should get out of it. Yeah, unless it is like a macro trend and there's a reason they cut the dividend to go into massive growth in R&D mode. Like if it was in the AI sector, if it was in one of those types of things, potentially could see possibly sticking in. Maybe. But you'd still have all that loss. And again, if that money, even though you're going to have a cost-unbiased situation going on, is that money going to make you more if you move it into something else versus just letting it sit and hoping it goes back? Hold and hope is not a strategy. Yeah, hold and hope is not a strategy. If, say, you have 2% and everything and then you just come across one that cuts their dividend to zero, you're only losing that maximum 2%. 2% is pretty... It's easier to cut that. That's a lot of stocks to manage. Yes, this is very true. But that's why we dropped it down to that 5% allocation and no more in one stock type deal. It's hard to hold onto that when things are running really good because you're like, I don't want to trim my position. I'm making so much money. But wasn't HTGC a really good example of that working out? HTGC, UAN, AGNC, all three of those in this year, they went above the 5% threshold, so I just sold some shares to get it back below the 5%. And then they dipped, didn't they? Didn't they dip? It does hold most of the time, so stick to the strategies. We are very, very shortly, now that we finally got the condo proceeds, going to literally rebrand, pivot the podcast into a new trajectory. It's not a complete 100% pivot. It's not 100%. But they're all tools to have in your arsenal. We are going to break down all of our different strategy metrics, when we employ what. I am going to actually systematize everything so that you can follow things and you can plug and play when certain scenarios hit, and that way it's a lot easier to follow than just this like, oh, what did they say about this thing? Trying to dig it out of the stuff. So I am going to automate and I am going to systematize a lot of things so that we have cheat sheets for people. That is coming. Now that the condo is gone and I don't have that freaking monkey on my back, good things are coming, big things are coming, and we're going to help you guys out as much as possible to do what you got to do with the dividend stuff or the investing stuff to decouple time and money. The only way that I know of that average people can make lots of money is dividends, compounding, and investing. Without having to start your own business. Even starting your own business, that's no guarantee. But I'm just saying, there are people that make it there, but this is almost like a, not a 100% guarantee, but it's like in the 90% guarantee that if you do this, you can just compound through the years and make a lot of money. And I want to say again, those lottery winners, which is the growth strategy approach where everybody is hoping to hit the next Amazon, those are few and far between. Few and far between. Like even Mark Cuban stated, like even the crypto stuff, you have to invest in 100 for like 1 to 2 to hit, or what is it, 10 to 100. I think it's one in every 10 hits that makes up for the losses of the other one. It's a numbers game. If you put all your eggs in one basket, it's in a growth strategy. But if you're a listener or a reader of the email, you'll know the macro trends and then you can just research the macro trends. Yep. So at least you limit or you downsize. Because I started that 2026 predictions probably in October. So I've been doing like a lot of research on that one. Like I want it to be the best. I think you're getting better year in year. I want to make sure it's like the best possible advice that people can use. It's pretty lengthy. It's going to probably be a two-parter. Yeah, it's going to be a two-parter episode, so get ready for that. And that's going to be in the middle of us transitioning and pivoting and launching and driving out to New Mexico. It's going to be a fun time. Again, the takeaways are the biggest part here. Are those a couple learning lessons and then like integrating that into the strategy going forward. So it's like always learn from your mistakes so that you don't keep making the same mistakes. And laugh at them. Yes. And you've got to have humor because it helps you metabolize that bad energy of the shame and the regret and the guilt and all the crap. But it helps you metabolize. I don't have any of that. I feel bad. It does go away once you do it a few times. I feel bad if people It's part of life. Mistakes are part of life. This person just recommended a stock and it's down 40%. I mean, I feel bad if their first stock they picked was that. The first stock they picked after listening to us is one that went down 40%, but like. You don't go all in one. I try my best. All right. See you guys next week. Actually, see you guys on the live stream if you're going to be on it. See you Thursday or Friday. Yeah, and if not, then we will see you guys. Or next week. Bye-byes.