Fear and the lost opportunity
This post was originally published on my old finance blog in February 2021. Transferred here as I am no longer maintaining that site. The numbers and the embarrassment remain unchanged.
On 7th February 2020, in the final minutes before the Singapore market closed, I bought 50,000 shares of Medtecs International (546.SI) at just over 10 cents each.
What happened next is one of those stories I tell myself I have learned from. I am still not entirely sure I have.
The setup
Medtecs is a manufacturer of medical protective equipment — masks, gowns, gloves. In early February 2020, Covid-19 was still being referred to cautiously as a “novel coronavirus” and Singapore was operating at DORSCON Yellow. PPE was not yet the household term it would become.
I bought the stock on instinct, on the thesis that masks and protective equipment were going to be in demand. The timing felt right. The price felt low.
Then, minutes after the market closed that same evening, the Ministry of Health announced that Singapore’s risk assessment had been raised from DORSCON Yellow to DORSCON Orange.
I had bought a PPE stock on the same day Singapore officially escalated its pandemic response. By accident. I felt like a genius.
The unravelling
The stock moved in the right direction over the following days. Medtecs was one of the few companies positioned to meet the sudden surge in demand for masks and PPE. The thesis was playing out.
Then the Deputy Executive Chairman disclosed that he had disposed of a significant portion of his shares.
That was enough for me. An insider selling — the person who knows the company best, getting out — felt like a signal I could not ignore. The stock price started to soften. My conviction evaporated almost immediately.
I sold everything on 20th February 2020.
Fifty thousand shares bought, fifty thousand shares sold. Total profit: approximately ten dollars, after fees.
What happened next
A few months later, Medtecs hit a high of around $2.00 per share.
The stock I had bought at 10 cents went to $2. A 20x return. On 50,000 shares, that would have been close to $100,000 in gains.
At the time of writing this post in February 2021, the stock is sitting at around $1.09 — still roughly a 10x return from my entry price.
I sold for ten dollars.
The lesson, honestly
The easy version of this story is: don’t panic sell, hold your winners, ignore short-term noise. That is all true.
But the more honest version is about what actually happened in the moment. I saw an insider selling and I did not ask why or whether it mattered to my thesis. I just felt fear — the specific fear of watching a gain disappear — and I acted on it immediately.
The fundamental case for Medtecs had not changed. A global pandemic was accelerating. PPE demand was nowhere near its peak. None of that had changed because one executive decided to take some money off the table.
I had a thesis. I abandoned it because someone else’s action frightened me.
The lesson: hold any stock based on its fundamentals, not on what other people are doing with theirs. Don’t let fear make decisions that your research should be making.
I have not always applied this lesson since. But I have not forgotten it either.
This is not financial advice. It is a record of one trade, one mistake, and what I took from it. Your situation is different from mine. Please make your own decisions.
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