We didn't sell the house in order to invest, we sold the house because we had moved to the neighboring County and didn't want to be landlords. When the funds cleared, we had to decide how to invest it. I could see no better investment with such little downside as Qualcomm in 2018 so we invested 90% and used the last 10% to pad our cash position to cover unexpected contingencies. I never invest a penny I cannot afford to lose. I have always invested aggressively relative to conventional investment "wisdom" and I compensate for the extra risk by searching out companies with limited downside (meaning they are very unlikely to lose most of their value). Qualcomm, at the time, was a screaming value with a solid and rapidly growing business and a very low share price. I will invest in companies that don't meet that criterion, but I reserve outsized positions for companies that qualify. I kind of break that rule by not selling as the company appreciates to higher valuations but that is justifiable in my style of investing because then I have the trend on my side and its still money I can afford to lose.
My style of investing is not for everyone, and I'm not saying it is. That said, I do believe it's a first principles way of attaining financial freedom that has many times higher chance of success than swing-trading your way to wealth. Essentially, it forgoes somewhat consistent results from year to year for much higher long-term appreciation and a higher chance of attaining more while starting with less. The reason I don't recommend it for everyone is it requires a more rigorous and accurate analysis of the risks of failure and chances of success and not everyone is well suited to doing that well.
It's also an investment style of opportunity. That means that in my 30 plus years of investing, most of the time I cannot even identify a single stock that has such a high reward/risk ratio that it justifies such an outsized investment. That's how rare it is for a stock to have such a high reward/risk ratio using the kind of analysis I do to identify such potential possibilities. And it's more of an exercise in philosophy, consumer behavior, legal analysis and human nature than it is a financial spreadsheet. Determining the odds of the success or failure of a company is not easy which is why I watched TSLA for over 8 years before I bought my first share in 2018 and my first significant position in 2019. I studied QCOM for two plus years before I bought my first share.
Apologies for the length of this but I felt the comment above misrepresented what I actually said. BTW, the summer cabin that we moved into was fully paid for as well. All paid for with massive stock appreciation of companies like MSFT and SBUX in the late 80's to early '90's. Any money we make from selling real estate is incidental, not part of a strategy to build wealth. We only buy real estate that we want to own, not for the capital gains potential. Making money in stocks is simply too easy vs. real estate speculation (or, heaven forbid, being landlords), so we sell any property we no longer want to use and invest the money in the market. It's always worked for us, but I encourage everyone to do it their own way.
/jk cheers!!
