Today's Animal Spirits listener mailbag edition is brought to you by Rocket Dollar. If you haven't listened yet, go back and listen to our Talk Your Book with Rocket Dollar founder, Henry Oshita, and also Rocket Dollar.com slash Animal Spirits brings you to an offer to download a free copy of the Rocket Dollar Guide to Self-Directed retirement plans. Michael and I have been learning a lot about these. We didn't know that much until Henry kind of schooled us on these. Go to that website, rockaddollar.com,

slash animal spirits and get your free copy there. Welcome to Animal Spirits, a show about

markets, life, and investing. Join Michael Batnik and Ben Carlson as they talk about what they're

reading, writing, and watching. Michael Batnik and Ben Carlson work for Ritt what they're reading, writing, and watching.

Michael Battenick and Ben Carlson work for Ritt Holt's Wealth Management.

All opinions expressed by Michael and Ben or any podcast guests are solely their own opinions and do not reflect the opinion of Rit Holt's Wealth Management.

This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon for investment

decisions.

Clients of Rithold's wealth management may maintain positions in the securities discussed in this podcast. So we do love talking about the markets, but we also get a ton of questions on retirement accounts. And we're not experts on ever retirement accounts. So as we've done the last couple times we've done this, we brought in an expert, Henry Oshita from Rocket Doll is going to help us answer a few questions on retirement accounts. Welcome to Animal Spirits with Michael and Ben. Michael, we're emptying the email again. We've got a whole dock full of listener questions. I even grabbed a question right before this show. That's how good this is with listener questions coming in. It's always something. I feel like this first question is directed directly for you because I can't answer this.

Okay.

Can you discuss the use of stop losses when owning individual stocks? Not sure about you, but I would regret having sold an individual stock that went on to be a 10-bagger winner, which I've done a lot more than I regret losing a large portion of initial investment. plenty of examples to cherry pick,

but a stop loss wouldn't have saved you on Netflix, PayPal, Facebook, blah, blah, blah.

So he says, P.S. Michael, convince Ben to get back into stock picking game. He's smarter than he looks and it's great to hear content about his mistakes. They just want to enjoy my mistakes on individual stock picking. We'll see. What say you about stop losses? Because you've used them in the past, I'm sure. I can say with 100% uncertainty, I've never used a stop loss in life. Well, can I tell you with 100% certainty that every single stop loss has been triggered? Every single stop loss that I ever placed was hit. This person also said, if you can't stomach at least a 50% drawdown on the path to large gains, you just shouldn't own individual stocks.

Concur. Now, this is a personal type of thing, but I want to circle back to one of the things that he said. He said, I would regret having sold an individual stock that went on to be a 10x

a lot more than I would regret losing a large portion of an initial investment of stock.

That right there is

critical. Only you know yourself. So what feels worse to you? For this person, what feels worse is

selling what is a gigantic future winner. And this person's right. If you are in it for a 10-bagger,

you literally cannot have a 10-ger without getting cut in a half.

It cannot ever be done.

There are other people who say, later for that, I'm not sitting around for a 50% drawdown

because I'm not in it for the 10x for the 10 bagger.

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