I almost didn’t write this because as I’ve mentioned before, I’m very much focused on long term returns only and simply by mentioning the Freedom Portfolio’s returns after one week it draws attention to it. In many ways, that’s the last thing I want to do. I personally think that the movement of a stock over the course of weeks or months is largely irrelevant and instead am focused on what the returns will be one, two or ideally three plus years down the line.

So there’s a weird chicken or the egg thing going on with this post where I wanted to stress how not worried I am about the poor performance so far, but to do so I have to draw attention to something that I think isn’t worth paying attention to.

The tie-breaker for me is that I found something in the performance of some positions in the Freedom Portfolio over the past week that I thought would be instructive to talk about: Waiting for a dip to start a position in a company.

Allow me to provide a little background info. Here are some of the largest positions in the Freedom Portfolio that have suffered some of the largest drops so far since October 1st:

Ticker	Company	Return
AMZN	Amazon	-7%
NFLX	Netflix	-7%
SHOP	Shopify	-14%
SQ	Square	-11%

This is some ugly performance over such a short time. However, here is the same chart including the performance of those companies year-to-date (including the most recent drop):

Ticker	Company	Oct 1	YTD
AMZN	Amazon	-7%	> 50%
NFLX	Netflix	-7%	> 70%
SHOP	Shopify	-14%	> 30%
SQ	Square	-11%	> 100%

That’s some amazing performance year-to-date. I often hear people talk about wanting to start a position in a company, but wanting to wait for a dip to buy because it just feels wrong to buy something that has already gone up so much. After all, we’re supposed to buy low and sell high, right? The natural conclusion is that we should wait for a stock to drop before buying. I want to submit the above chart as an argument for why that could be the wrong way to think about things. There’s an opportunity cost to waiting to buy on a dip, and that’s the chance that the stock appreciates a lot more while you are waiting for the dip than it eventually drops. If somebody wanted to buy some Square (SQ) stock but wanted to “buy low” and wait for a dip, it’s conceivable that they missed out on the stock more than doubling during that time.

Sometimes buying low means buying later at a higher price than it would’ve been buying high now.

I’m not suggesting everybody should jump into every stock that crosses their mind immediately, but I think it’s worth questioning the idea that the way to win when it comes to investing is to “buy low”. Sometimes buying low means buying later at a higher price than it would’ve been buying high now. If you really love a company but are having trouble justifying buying shares at its current price, then start with a small position. That way it’s almost like a win-win no matter what happens. If it goes up, you win because your stock is going up. If it goes down then you can buy more at a better price. Don’t let a dogmatic attachment to buying low make you miss out on a potentially great investment.