Meb Faber – Avoid the Physical Pain of Loss by Sticking to Your Investment Plan

Meb Faber is co-founder and Chief Investment Officer of Cambria Investment Management and manages Cambria’s ETFs and separate accounts. He is the host of the Meb Faber Show and has authored numerous white papers and leather-bound books. He is a frequent speaker and writer on investment strategies and has been featured in Barron's, The New York Times, and The New Yorker. Meb graduated from the University of Virginia with a double major in engineering, science, and biology.   “The funny thing about investing in the computer age is we can now rely on an enormous library of investing ideas and concepts.” Meb Faber   Worst investment ever The young investor with a chip on his shoulder Like many young investors, when Meb got into investing as a young biotech engineering graduate in the 90s, he was full of vigor, overconfidence, and believed that he was the best investor on the planet. At the time, the US was hit by the Dotcom bubble and US stocks were the most expensive they've ever been. And so, it was a wild time that made crypto look basic. Wild times for investors It was a pretty wild time to be investing, but also, biotech was a big deal. The human genome was getting sequenced by the government as well as the company Celera, and so biotech stocks were also going crazy. Amid this madness, Meb identified a good stock to invest in, Biogen. This was in the early 2000s when biotech and pharma stocks were extremely volatile creating a lot of investment opportunities. The storm that is biotech stocks In most cases, biotech stocks, unless it's a monster like Pfizer, will have these binary events where they have a drug that's either going to get approved or not, in which case the shares will go 100% up or down. The whole company is leveraged to one outcome. And so that creates a lot of opportunity and volatility. So with Biogen, everyone knew there was a date in the future where the company would announce whether the drug was approved or not. Meb believed that the drug was not going to get approved. Choosing his best investment options...