Ouch! 9 painful calls from 2022

And there's a really simple lesson from this that can be applied to everyone. And that is that when a story like that, which everyone has so loved and bought - when you start to see the first things going wrong, we tend to remember why it was such a good story and don't give it time for really the bad news to flow out. But you've got to give the market time to catch up with how that story has changed and just see how deeply they mark it down.

And so, what we are seeing is that the market has its earnings going backwards this year and next year and, as a result, the stock's fallen a fair bit. We're still long. I don't mind it. It has a 10% yield and a PE of 6.5 times. It's going to be a tough six to 12 months, but we think it's okay.

3. Xero (ASX: XRO)

Catherine Allfrey: We have held Xero since COVID-19 and clearly it's been a terrible performer this year. The main reason has been the cost base. The cost base has been really mismanaged. They've overspent through that time. Revenue growth hasn't been a problem. They grew at 30% and they'll probably grow at about 20% in the next year in terms of the top line. But they really need to address their costs and we need to see some profit.

Ally Selby: Have you sold out of that position or have you been adding to it?

Catherine Allfrey: We did sell down and now we're looking to add to it. Sukhinder Singh Cassidy is coming on. We've met her, the new CEO, and we like what we are hearing from her, but we want to see what her plan is before we push the lever in terms of buying more.

5. Maggie Beer Holdings (ASX: MBH)

Matthew Kidman: We had a few really poor investments and they were mainly at the micro-cap end, so liquidity was a real issue, even though the companies themselves might not have performed operationally that badly. So, of all of them, I would pick a little company called Maggie Beer Holdings. Everyone knows the brand name, it's a food company. They had some assets they were trying to get rid of, and it hasn't quite worked out. It's been a bit of a mess. The earnings haven't had the momentum you would've thought, but let's see how it goes in the end. It's probably halved and it's hard to get out of those small caps. So, you end up saying they're your worst investments.

6. Megaport (ASX: MP1)

Jun Bei Liu: Not many stocks have gone down a lot, but the biggest one would be Megaport. We are a big believer in Megaport. It's a small position for us, but we always believe you need to future-proof your portfolio and a little company like that, with such fast growth and adoption across the cloud, is well leveraged to the growing demand for the cloud and data.

Clearly, the last 12 months have been very rocky for this company. To start with, it was a very expensive business. It's not a cashflow profitable business. It's getting very close to it, but it is a very rapid growth business and that has really, really hurt its share price because it was too expensive.

What have we learnt from it? We still hold Megaport. We still think it's a great company on the long-term view. Just for the time being, it probably will stay where it is, simply because it is on an expensive valuation. 

7. Netflix (NASDAQ: NFLX)

Mary Manning: Definitely Netflix. So, I was quite late getting invested in Netflix. If you remember, there was that really exciting Korean show Squid Games that came out and the stock ran really hard. I had the view that there was a very strong content slate at Netflix. And that content was going to drive users and users were going to drive earnings. That was my thesis. And we got in after the Squid Games run-off and that whole model, that whole thesis, broke down. They did have a very strong content slate, but they weren't getting any users and that was impacting earnings.

9. Sonic Healthcare (ASX: SHL)

Romano Sala Tenna: Surprisingly, it was actually Sonic Healthcare. And it's probably a stock we're not upset to lose money on, to be honest, because it's been a great long-term compounder and we think in the coming years we'll do well on it. I think we were caught out a little bit in terms of seeing the way that the revenues from COVID testing were rebased. That really impacted the short-term outlook for the business and that's what drove it lower.