ValueBuddies.com : Value Investing Forum - Singapore, Hong Kong, U.S.

Historically, the best stock to own for the long term, has been the stalwart compounder; companies that has enduring moat, are well managed, that kept finding new ways to reinvest and compound earnings, and reward shareholders along the way.

Overseas, some big names instantly comes to mind: Berkshire, Apple, Walmart, Coca Cola, Nike, Disney, Costco, Tencent, Amazon etc. What are some of the most successful publicly traded company of all time in Singapore? 

It's easy to find such 'top-10-list' for overseas companies (https://www.kiplinger.com/slideshow/inve...index.html). Not so much for Singapore stocks.

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More on compounders: Mohnish Pabrai – on FANGS, overcoming biases, GM, 3 Book recomendations, when to sell compounders
https://www.valuewalk.com/2017/06/mohnis...mpounders/

Quote:Each of us has limited quota of 100 baggers that will show up our portfolio. I have had more than my quota I was smart enough to buy but too dumb to hold.  I owned Amazon in 2002 at $10 and it was 10% of my portfolio then. I got 40% in a few months and I was out.  What I have learnt is that don’t sell the compounders when they get fully priced or they get over-priced. Only sell the compounders when its absolutely obvious to you that is egregiously priced. The big money is in riding the compounders but you have to try to get in at a reasonable valuation and you have to be right on the fact they are compounders. It’s a forgiving business, so you can be wrong quite a few times and still be ok. It was a difficult lesson for a cheapstake for me. It was a very difficult lesson for Warren and Charlie. I think they learnt the lesson from See’s Candy, that was a seminal lesson for them. If you get into businesses where management are exceptional or the moats are exceptions or in the case of Google you get both, then those are businesses you just don’t want to touch

There is no such thing as "buy and forget", all companies go thru their own boom and bust cycle, no moat is safe forever and all companies go into terminal decline at some point.

For evidence look no further than the venerable Dow Jones industrial average, of the original Dow components, only GE is still hanging on (albeit by a thread), the rest have either gone into terminal decline and/or are now mere shadows of the companies they were during the glory days.

Btw I think KO is on the precipice of being such a company, the stock has performed very poorly in the last decade due to changing consumer tastes (more consumers are now aware of the ill-effects of sugar and more recently, artificial sweeteners). 

I think buy and forget is only possible with a well diversified index tracker fund like the SPY, anything else requires a lot of close monitoring i.e knowing when to get out before the business goes into a permanent decline.

Partially agree that growth don't last forever, that said, there are growth stories that lasts decades and decades (like those I mentioned), and one may be foolish to sell out too quickly. You brought up a fair point though, that it is the investor's job to recognize when an industry's peak growth phase is over, and switch out to another ticker earlier in it's growth cycle.