If any share makes me wonder what lessons I’ve missed over the past 10 years, it’s Lloyds Banking Group (LSE: LLOY). And I know my biggest weakness isn’t knowing when to sell.
I bought at around 90p per share, and the Lloyds share price is now hovering around 40p. So I’d clearly have been better off had I sold, but how could I have known when?
I like to look forward in my investment thinking. But we have to learn from our mistakes. And, more importantly, looking back can help me decide what to do in the future.
I bought Lloyds shares when the banking sector was emerging from the financial crisis, and dividends were just reappearing. Lloyds, along with what was then Royal Bank of Scotland (now NatWest Group) had come through their government bailouts. RBS was about a year behind in getting its dividend back, and I went for Lloyds — in part because I saw significantly less uncertainty. And the Lloyds share price was recovering.
But roll on to 2016 and the Brexit referendum. The result shocked me. I really wasn’t expecting it to even be close. Banking shares quickly lost ground, so should I have sold then? Here’s where I definitely made a mistake. I like to follow Warren Buffett’s approach to situations like that. When something rocks one of my companies, I should step back and look at the whole thing afresh.
The need to step back
Thinking about it in terms of my Lloyds, the bank I knew so well, that was my error. I should have abandoned all I knew, and done my analysis from scratch again. Had I done that, would I have sold? Well, I’d have been shaken by the amount of uncertainty the Brexit result had thrown up. I held shares in a strengthening bank operating in a Europe-wide market, with London being the banking centre of the continent. That, the core of the bank’s strength, was thrown away overnight, and yet I sat on a tumbling Lloyds share price and did nothing.
We didn’t know what the full fallout of that referendum result would be. We didn’t know what banking rights the UK would be left with. But we surely did know that things would never be the same again. I don’t know if I’d have sold had I approached it properly. But I did make a key mistake of not taking full account of what happened.
Latest Lloyds share price crash
But what about the Covid-19 pandemic? Since that took hold, the Lloyds share price has crashed by 30%. So was that another missed selling opportunity? No, I don’t think so. I certainly wouldn’t have been quick enough to sell before the initial crash — and I don’t do panic selling anyway. The Lloyds share price fell more than 30% in a couple of weeks, and slumped to a 50% loss not long after. But it’s recovering.
Saying that, the banking sector has changed fundamentally again. And again, that means it’s time to re-evaluate from scratch. I think I’ve done a better job of it this time. And with dividends returning (again), I’m definitely not selling now.