Is the old “invest in what you know” adage misleading investors? An article by Investopedia thinks so, stating that only investing in what you know actually increases risk. Says the piece, “many of the biggest returns will be made from companies you have never heard of and do NOT understand.” We’ll call these the Rumsfeld stocks – the “unknown unknowns.”
It’s tough to come up with an example of a stock that made it big which wasn’t easy to understand. In a previous article, we asked the question, What is the Best Performing Tech Stock Ever? When looking at compound annual growth rate, the answer was Netflix, a company that provides media as a subscription. That’s an easy business model to understand. So were the rest in our list. The question is, are there companies we don’t try to understand that we’re missing out on?
In figuring out which companies to cover here on Nanalyze, we’re quick to pass on anything that looks too complex for the average layperson to understand. When we came across Seer, we couldn’t quite decide whether or not proteomics was a rabbit hole we wanted to crawl into. In light of our desire to avoid any unknown unknowns, we decided to give it a go.
Seer – A Proteomics Stock