Mistakes fade away; winners can forever blossom.

 

—Warren Buffett

 

As 2026 rises ahead of us, there’s a lesson I intend to keep in the front of my mind.

Mistakes make you smarter. You learn much more from them than successes. Winners that come from learning will far outweigh the losses of any mistakes.

This should give some peace to us all.

You’ll make mistakes in investing, especially when in a rush to secure a ‘great price’ or avoid ‘unnecessary risk’.

If you can review and learn from these errors, you’ll become a much better investor.

The wins that follow from the learning process will drive significant wealth.

 

Source: Image by Gabrielli Pereira from Pixabay

Buffett’s late business partner, Charlie Munger, put it most eloquently:

‘Nobody bats a thousand. I think it’s important to review your past stupidities so you are less likely to repeat them, but I’m not gnashing my teeth over it or suffering or enduring it.’

Well, a mistake we made is one that Munger also publicly admitted some years back:

‘I don’t mind not having caught Amazon early. The guy (Jeff Bezos) is kind of a miracle worker, it’s very peculiar. But I feel like a horse’s ass for not identifying Google earlier. We screwed up.’

Over the past five years, Alphabet Inc [NASDAQ:GOOG] is up over 260%.

Over the last year, it is up over 60%.

We reported on Google back in May 2024.

While we did pinpoint upside, the downside weighed in our minds. In particular, the decline of traffic in Q1, AI competition, younger users moving to other platforms like TikTok, and legal challenges from antitrust lawsuits.

Our view on the Company was summed up in this sentiment:

The high level of uncertainty and negligible dividend yield doesn’t point to ready gains outside another tech boom.

Of course, we missed that the US was already entering a much stronger AI tech boom, and that this would be accelerated by Nvidia and the election of Donald Trump in November 2024. We also missed the startling progress Google would later make with AI and Gemini.

Reporting on Google — and the analysis work we subsequently did — led us not to invest in the Company for our wholesale portfolios back in 2024.

To be fair, Google was never going to be a straightforward fit with our value strategy. We like income. But it was a kicker that we failed to harness. Yes, I feel like a horse’s ass.

Having missed one tech breakout, we’re determined not to miss the next.

Well, there is another potential kicker that we have actually purchased…

 

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