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My worst biotech investment

Nature Biotechnology volume 24, page 401 (2006)Cite this article

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No one enjoys investing losses, but no investor picks only winners. Even Warren Buffett had his US Airways and Peter Lynch the fraudulent Belgian car exporter ACLN. To deny losers is to pretend you can avoid losing money in the stock market. You can't. Every successful investor's record is an average of winners and losers, and losses often teach more than profits. On this happy note, today I stand first in the confessional line, inviting all schadenfreude.

My worst biotech investment, drug maker QLT (Vancouver, BC, Canada; Nasdaq:QLTI), appeared in this column in October 2004 (Nat. Biotechnol. 22, 1221). Its history illustrates four simple truths. First, every investment is a wager on the chance of potential events, which no matter how certain you are, may not occur. Second, neither you, nor alleged experts, nor professionals have any control over the course of events. Third, because of these two truths, you will have losses. And fourth, as a result, accepting the occasional but inevitable loss ensures a longer, happier and less stressful investing life.

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Authors
  1. Tom Jacobs
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Tom Jacobs is cofounder of Complete Growth Investor, http://www.completegrowth.com, a stock service for individual investors. Tom owned no shares of the companies mentioned in this article at time of writing. He welcomes your comments at tom@completegrowth.com.

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Jacobs, T. My worst biotech investment. Nat Biotechnol 24, 401 (2006). https://doi.org/10.1038/nbt0406-401

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