I don't sell often. That is worth saying up front, because it's the reason this story stands out in my own head rather than blending into a hundred other trades. Most of what I own I have held through drawdowns I did not enjoy. So when I ask myself which position I sold too early, there is really only one answer, and it's Johnson & Johnson.
I no longer own it. It sits on my watchlist and I have not bought back in, which means I am writing about a company I have no position in and no stake in your opinion of. The numbers below are from our own price archive and the live edition this site publishes; you can check them against the JNJ page.
What I was actually doing in 2019
I bought JNJ around the middle to late part of 2019. I was a new graduate and a new pediatric physical therapist, and my increments were small — I was getting one or two shares as I could afford them. There was nothing sophisticated about the selection. I was buying big names I was familiar with.
What I was really buying was the dividend. Income was a genuine factor in why I picked JNJ, and for the first couple of years it did exactly what I wanted. The share price stayed pretty even and the payments kept arriving. When the COVID crash came, the stock went down with everything else, and I was glad to own something stable that paid me while I waited.
That was the thesis, and it was working.
Where it went wrong
It was the rally afterward that changed me. Watching what came out of 2020 and into 2021, I started noticing growth and factoring it into decisions in a way I hadn't before. That part was not a mistake. Growth belongs in the analysis.
But somewhere around late 2022, I let the pendulum swing too far. I sold all of my Johnson & Johnson — the position I had built one or two shares at a time, the one I had specifically bought for income and stability — to fund some more speculative buys.
I want to be precise about the error, because it wasn't that I changed my mind about JNJ. I didn't conclude the business was deteriorating, or that the dividend was at risk, or that the valuation had run away from the fundamentals. I didn't examine it at all. I wanted to own something more exciting, and JNJ was the money.
What I bought with it
Beyond Meat. Nikola. A pink-sheet energy company whose ticker I genuinely cannot remember today, which tells you roughly how much research went into it.
I got clobbered. I took my beating and eventually exited all of them, and that part I am actually glad about — cutting those positions was the right decision, even though it came after the damage. Nikola has since gone through bankruptcy. I don't have a precise accounting of what those trades cost me, and I'm not going to invent one.
The arithmetic
I sold JNJ at roughly $173 a share in late 2022. It trades at $266.35 as I write this.
That's about 54% in price alone. Add the thirteen dividend payments I would have collected since — $16.05 a share — and the total I left behind is closer to 63%.
The dividends are the part that stings. I bought the company for income. Then I sold the income to buy three businesses that produced none, two of which no longer meaningfully exist.
One technical note, since precision matters here: Johnson & Johnson separated Kenvue in 2023, and that kind of corporate action can distort a long-run price comparison. In this case it doesn't. Kenvue was a split-off exchange offer rather than a pro-rata spin-off, so a shareholder who simply held and did nothing kept their JNJ shares untouched. The comparison above is what a passive holder would actually have experienced.
Would this site's model have stopped me?
I've thought about this, and the honest answer is that I don't know what would have told me at the time.
It's tempting to claim the screen I built would have saved me, but I don't think that's true, and the numbers don't support it either. Johnson & Johnson scores 47.6 today. Quality is strong at 0.80 and growth is respectable at 0.70, but the value pillar sits at 0.19 — by this model's own reckoning, it is expensive. It would not come near the Top 30. A screen built to find quality growth at a fair price would not be pounding the table for JNJ now, and I have no evidence it would have then.
There's a more uncomfortable reason too. A model only helps you if you consult it, and I didn't consult anything. I acted emotionally. What I wish is not that I'd owned a better tool. It's that I had taken the time to look more closely at the metrics instead of deciding how I felt and working backward.
That distinction matters for anyone reading this site. The screen tells you what looks attractive to buy. It does not tell you to hold what you already own, and it cannot stop you from selling something to chase a story. That job belongs to the process you bring to it.
What it actually built
This is part of learning, and I'd rather say that plainly than dress it up as a catastrophe. I was a few years into investing, using my own money, and I made a decision on feel instead of evidence. The tuition was real but survivable.
What came out of it is most of what this site now does automatically. Scoring value alongside growth instead of letting one crowd out the other. Writing down the reasoning so a decision can be checked later rather than remembered generously. Treating "I want something more exciting" as the warning sign it is.
These bricks help build the philosophy I use today. I sold a quality company for the wrong reasons, and I bought speculation for worse ones, and the record of both is above.
I still don't sell often. That is not an accident anymore.
I do not own Johnson & Johnson, Beyond Meat, or Nikola, and held none of them at the time of writing. Prices are from our own archive and the current published edition. Nothing here is a recommendation — it's an account of my own decisions, including the ones I got wrong. Invest at your own risk.