I wanted to do something a little unusual and talk about a company that isn’t in the Freedom Portfolio. The Trade Desk (TTD) is a company that I first heard about around a year ago while working at The Motley Fool. I knew some people there were pretty interested in the company at the time, but I personally couldn’t quite understand what competitive advantage they had so I never purchased any shares. As you can see below, that turned out to be a mistake.

The Trade Desk has nearly quadrupled over the past year, which is obviously an incredible run. It has also had a number of days where the stock price has jumped double digit percentages. Each time that’s happened, I’ve kicked myself for not having bought shares the last time it had a big jump.

It’s incredibly easy to have FOMO, fear of missing out, when investing in individual companies. In investing, unlike with Pokémon, you can’t catch ’em all. The Trade Desk isn’t at all the only big winner that I’ve missed out on, and it will by no means be the last. This may seem obvious, but I think it’s important to remember. Warren Buffett didn’t invest in Alphabet (GOOG) or Amazon (AMZN). Peter Lynch missed out on Starbucks (SBUX) and Netflix (NFLX). Some of the greatest investors of our time missed out on some of the best investments of our time.

Individual investors don’t have to be perfect. They don’t even have to be close to perfect. I try not to obsess over the ones that got away or, worse yet, chase after investments that are outside of my comfort zone. I missed out on The Trade Desk, and maybe I’ll never have an investment have such stunning performance over such a short period of time. That doesn’t deter me at all, and I hope it doesn’t deter you. I don’t believe I have to be perfect to beat the market… just better than average.