Dear Partner 👋

In 2018, I played a game.

15,000 people each started with a fictional $50,000 to invest.

Whoever made the most profit after 10 weeks, won.

Out of 15,000 people… I won.

I won a cash price of $5.000.

$5,000 was a lot of money for me back then.

I was still a student.

While waiting for the price money to arrive, I decided to do my homework.

I would fully invest that $5.000 right away.

At age 23, I realized that $5,000 could grow into $4.8 million if I compounded it at 10% per year until age 95 (Warren Buffett’s current age).

After a week of research, I decided to buy the Belgian company Lotus Bakeries ($LOTB).

The price money was just enough to buy 2 shares of Lotus Bakeries (stock price: €2.500).

I knew Lotus Bakeries was a great company.

A company that ticked all the boxes for a Tiny Titan stock.

But the payout of that price money took a while.

It made me hesitate.
I started to overthink stuff.
In the meantime, I spoke with other investors.

And everyone seemed to agree…

Lotus Bakeries?

A great company. But it might be a bit too expensive.

The company traded at 28x earnings in 2018.

So I decided to temporarily buy a different stock.
I would wait until Lotus Bakeries became cheaper.

What I bought instead?

The food company Ter Beke. Today better known as What’s Cooking.

I only owned What’s Cooked for a short period of time. But it wasn’t a great experience.

And actually, I could have seen it coming.

The company’s track record was poor.

Long story short: my price money was poorly allocated.

Shame on me.

But it gets even worse…

Besides making a loss… I paid a way higher price: a hefty opportunity cost.

While What’s Cooking fell, Lotus Bakeries kept rising.

Today, Lotus Bakeries is trading at a stock price of over €10.000 (!).

My price money would have 4x’ed if I bought the company.

It’s a valuable lesson: winners often keep winning.

It’s better to invest in champions than in so-called turnarounds.

Turnarounds seldom turn.

Just look at the numbers.

Compare Lotus with What’s Cooking, based on the criteria we are looking for at Tiny Titans.

The difference couldn’t be larger.

Lotus checks almost every box. What’s Cooking barely checks two.

Lotus Bakeries is an amazing success story.

If you invested $10.000 in the company in 2000, you would have over $2 million today.

You have a lot of examples like this:

🔧 Applied Materials: +185,500% since 1986
🎬 Netflix: +73,300% since 2002
🔬 Danaher: +63,300% since 1986
😴 ResMed: +31,200% since 1995
🏢 Johnson Controls: +6,200% since 1986

At Tiny Titans, we look for these companies every single day.

$500.000 of real money is invested.

The goal? Grow this amount to $5 million.

To me, it’s not the question if we will achieve.
The question is when we will achieve this (it might take a while).

Our Portfolio consists of wonderful companies that keep generating more shareholder value over time.

In the end, that’s the only thing that matters.

Don’t make the same mistake as me

The key thing I want you to takeaway from today’s article?

Don’t make the same mistake as the one I made.
Don’t comprise quality to invest in value traps.

We invest in Tiny (small quality) companies that have the potential to become Titans over time.

This can be very lucrative.

Why?

Warren Buffett agrees this is the best way to make amazing returns over time:

Just look at how these small quality stocks performed over the past 100 years: