process
Coffee Can Portfolio
The rule
Buy a set of quality businesses, then lock them away for ten years or more, so you cannot fidget and trade the growth away.
Where it flips
Sealing the jar can also mean ignoring a business that has truly broken since you bought it, so patience turns into neglect. The fix: review holdings now and then for real decline, and let the lock-away rule stop trading on noise, not on facts.
The idea is to pick strong businesses with care, then put them in an imaginary sealed jar and refuse to touch them for ten years or longer. By removing your own power to react to every scare and every hot tip, you let the best winners run without cutting them short. The rule protects you mainly from yourself, since most damage to long-term returns comes from restless buying and selling. It works only if the businesses you seal away were truly worth a decade of patience in the first place.
A worked example
Aarvi puts ₹1 lakh each into eight quality businesses and decides not to trade them for ten years. Two fail, three plod along, but two become large winners that carry the whole jar to ₹22 lakh, an outcome she would have wrecked by selling the winners early out of nerves. [illustrative]
How to spot it
- ·Bought for a decade-long hold
- ·No trading on daily news
- ·Sell only on real, lasting decline
Christopher Mayer · 100 Baggers