"It's not a lie if you believe it"
A couple of weeks ago, I explained that I am currently in the process of moving ~85% of my portfolio from Canada to the US now that I have become a permanent resident in the US. Physically moving from one country to another can be stressful, and it turns out even moving assets digitally can be pretty complex too. Long story short, I decided to sell all the stocks I had in Canada and then transfer the cash to buyback the stocks in the US. I knew this would lead to some capital gain taxes but the simplicity of having everything in one country convinced me to go through the process anyway.
Unfortunately, the whole episode turned out to be bit of a nightmare for me.
As my bank in Canada asked me to be physically present in Canada to initiate the wire transfer back to the US, I decided to sell the stocks and travel to Canada to finish this process. I knew capital gain taxes wasn’t the only headache, and I could potentially gain or lose some during the transition period. Frankly speaking, in my mind, I was thinking of either gaining or losing max ~200-300 bps of my portfolio. Again, I was okay with the risk involved as I was much more eager to make my tax situation simple by keeping my portfolio and business in the same country so that I can concentrate on investing and studying businesses. I have paid a very, very hefty price for the desire for simplicity as I ended up effectively “losing” 1,000 bps of my portfolio during this transition!
After my portfolio flailing for much of this year, it appears it almost bottomed near the day I sold my stocks in Canada. For hardly any discernible reasons, almost all the stocks I used to own started rallying simultaneously.
Take Meta, for example. I was forced to sell the stocks at ~$564. It dipped a little bit after I sold and I was optimistic of being able to buy it back around the same price (or lower). Then all on a sudden, the stock rallied by ~10% following a report by Bloomberg last week that “Meta is planning a cloud business to sell AI computing power”. I was shocked to see the market reacted at all on that news since this really should not have been much of a market moving news. This is what Zuckerberg mentioned in October 2025 during Meta’s 3Q’25 call:
“…any compute that we don’t need for that we feel pretty good that we’re going to be able to absorb a very large amount of that to just convert into more intelligence and better recommendations in our family of apps and ads in a profitable way.
Now I mean, it’s, of course, possible to overshoot that, right? And if we do, I mean, this is what I mentioned in my comments, then we see that there’s just a lot of demand for other new things that we build internally, externally. Like almost every week, people come to us from outside the company asking us to stand up an API service or asking if we have different compute that they could get from us and we haven’t done that yet. But obviously, if you got to a point where you overbuilt, you could have that as an option.”
If Meta overbuilds, it should have been blatantly obvious to anyone who’s paying attention that they aren’t just going to pointlessly hoard the assets and would rather sell their compute capacity as long as it easily clears the marginal costs. The fact that market reacted so positively on this news might imply that many investors were making seemingly absurd assumption that Meta would hoard compute capacity and eat depreciation costs even if they cannot figure out a way to monetize it. I’m not going to analyze Meta’s compute project in this post today, but frankly speaking, I think the real reason for such short-term stock price movement may be far more mundane. It’s perhaps mostly just random walk. I obviously intellectually knew any short-term stock price moves largely in a Brownian motion, but I truly internalized it after helplessly watching this random Brownian motion at work over the last couple of weeks.
As I said, nearly everything I used to own perplexingly rallied hard over the last couple of weeks. Veeva and Ryan Specialty are both up ~25% on basically no incremental news flow. Two larger holdings such as Airbnb and Floor & Decor are up ~8% and ~12% respectively. These are really outsized move over the course of a week or two across disparate sectors on essentially very little to no incremental news. I got to admit that the stock market appears to be acting in strange way these days as large cap stocks are making outsized moves in an increasingly random fashion. If anyone leans to form their opinion based on short-term stock price movements, this market can make such investors increasingly insane. If you have the luxury of investing for the long-term, I suggest you take such opportunity with both hands and save yourself from the daily Brownian motions of the stock market. Give yourself peace and enjoy your hard earned wealth than being slave to your screen to watch the stocks tick by tick.
Of course, once the money was transferred, I was facing another difficult question: what do I do now? Should I patiently wait for the Brownian motion to work in my favor? If some truly fundamental drivers changed the stocks, it would be easier to decide, but since it appears mostly random factor-driven narrative mumbo-jumbo that just wildly oscillates from one day to another, I was in a severe limbo for a day or two. Admittedly, this was the worst I have ever felt in my almost 13 years of managing my money. After some soul searching, I decided to prioritize my own mental peace and just buyback whatever I sold. It was such a soul crushing experience that I decided to forget that it ever happened.
Of course, I don’t have enough money to buyback everything I sold. As a result, I was still forced to make some decisions in terms of what/how to buy the stocks I sold. I have decided to not buyback Veeva and Ryan Specialty. I may eventually buy them back depending on their respective stock prices. Except for Veeva and Ryan, I bought back everything that I used to own. However, to help me cope this episode, I will treat Veeva and Ryan Specialty as something I sold today for disclosure purposes. I will also not penalize my portfolio for the “lost” performance and will assume I have held the stocks I owned all along. I know that’s a lie, but please allow me to believe this lie to psychologically deal with the eyewatering money I have lost in the ether. I know I’m pulling a Costanza here. I myself dislike the “woe is me” tone in today’s piece, but I didn’t want to hide how terrible I was feeling during this process. Once I got this whole saga behind me, I started feeling a lot better and came back to my usual baseline of optimism and gratitude.
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Current Portfolio
Please note that these are NOT my recommendation to buy/sell these securities, but just disclosure from my end so that you can assess potential biases that I may have because of my own personal portfolio holdings. Always consider my write-up my personal investing journal and never forget my objectives, risk tolerance, and constraints may have no resemblance to yours.
My current portfolio is disclosed below: