Ouch! 10 awful calls from 2020

My biggest mistake was actually missing out on the incredible run that e-commerce stocks had, which I can't believe I did because I am a shopper and I shop online all the time. I was too finicky on my valuations and thought I was going to be too late to the party once they started running, and I missed out on a huge amount of upside, which was very frustrating.

Temple & Webster I would have bought. I just didn't foresee the huge spending on homewares and furniture and the operating leverage there. They really got it right. 

Alibaba Group Holding (NYSE:BABA)

Vihari Ross, Magellan

Well, we thought we'd found a real compounder for the decades and it was Airbus. And this was a business that we'd invested in because it was the leader over Boeing in a global duopoly for commercial jet planes. And the world needed, at that time, about 37,000 more jet planes over the next two decades with a lot of demand coming out of the emerging markets in Asia as they grew up over time. And that was a wonderful outlook for an excellent business, and then the world changed early this year. And it changed dramatically for Airbus, unfortunately.

They had to stall production. They had to take on some borrowings to get through. The demand outlook is just weaker than what it was at the time that we invested. And so you'd say maybe the flight trajectory or the flight path for their earnings is not as rosy as what it once was. It's still an excellent business, it was just caught in the wrong place at the wrong time. 

Sanofi (EPA:SAN)

Dr Bianca Ogden, Platinum Asset Management

Look, in healthcare or in biotech there's always one that explodes. I had a couple of those as well, but one that gives me a bit of headache is pharma companies. So Sanofi in France, that is at the moment not going the right way, so that's a bit of a headache for me at the moment.

oOh!Media (ASX:OML)

Olivia Salmon, Lennox Capital

The absolute number one mistake we made in 2020 was not participating in the Ooh!Media capital raise. So there was an emergency capital raise, blood was on the streets. As you know, that's the time to buy, and we were just too uncertain on the earnings and the visibility of the earnings. This was a make or break capital raise for the company, and this was at the height of the pandemic. We were just too nervous about those earnings coming through. 

Now, what you've obviously seen is the ad market improve out of sight, outdoor media is one of these assets that I think will be around for the longterm and is unlikely to really be cornered out by digital advertising any more than it already has been. So we're actually holders of the stock now, it just would have been great to get it at the absolute bottom.  

Auckland International Airport (ASX:AIA)

Ben Clark, TMS Capital

The biggest learning for us is actually just underestimating the size and the duration of this stimulus. We were initially worried that when JobKeeper was removed in September, what happened to unemployment, what would happen to your corporate failure rates? But clearly, the government and the RBA have shown that they're prepared to do whatever it takes to keep the economy going, to create jobs. And so that supports our view from here on, that we will see an earnings recovery for the cyclical companies. But yeah, that's what we've got wrong. So, clearly, no two cycles are the same.

Treasury had the trifecta of COVID, of oversupply in US Commercial Wine, and then you have this 170% trade tariff. So, what else could go wrong really? 

Elders (ASX:ELD)

Matthew Kidman, Centennial Asset Management

I think the worst one we had was Elders. Because you go back to March and April and you're looking at the stocks, you want to be back in the market after the big fall, but you want to be in stocks that aren't too dangerous. And of course, the ag sector was lifting. Elders is the best of breed in that sector, best management. You buy that at $10. It goes along, the season gets better, the momentum's in the business, it puts out its result for September. Guess what it beats. It's been sold ever since I've sat on a stock when the market's up 30%, it's flat and it's beaten every forecast. 

So I misread it, it was a crowded trade. And did I learn anything? Not really because I've done it a few times this year. So I rarely learn from my mistakes, I keep doing them, but luckily it wasn't too dangerous in an upward moving market. 

As a small cap fund manager, there's always a few of them, and I thought I'd choose rather than one stock, a couple of them. The travel sector for us, when you look at Webjet or Corporate Travel, these stocks were stocks we didn't own prior to the crisis. They're stocks we watched during the crisis, punched the skies, thought we nailed them. They were going down, they were collapsing, they were going to recapitalize. We didn't buy them. That was the mistake. I think we look back now six months post the crisis, and some of the market caps of these stocks are actually higher than they were pre the crisis, which I think is quite an extraordinary thing.

So what's the lesson? I think the lesson is when the time comes to buy, you won't want to. That old saying. And I think that applies in our case to Webjet and Corporate Travel, that sort of travel space. We didn't pull the trigger when they're on their lows during April and May.