Dear Disgruntled Facebook Inc (FB) Investors: Get a Clue

I’ve said it a million times and I’ll say it until my last breath: Our greatest advantage as investors is time. Embrace it, invest accordingly and go do something productive. If you’re worried about a stock price over such a short period of time as a year then you shouldn’t be investing in individual stocks at all. Just dollar-cost average in an index fund and move on. If you are truly interested in investing in individual stocks, then you need to adjust your mind-set. I think Peter Lynch put it best when he said, “Although it’s easy to forget sometimes, a share is not a lottery ticket… it’s part-ownership of a business.”

Part-ownership of a business, indeed. When you start investing with this mind-set, you start looking at the bigger picture: How a company makes its money, what its competitive advantages are, the management team behind it all, what it will do over the coming decade to create value. These are all questions you need to ask yourself before you invest your hard-earned cash. It’s Foolish (note the big “F”) and it works.

Was I too harsh?

I’ve been as vocal a critic of Facebook Inc (NASDAQ:FB) as anyone. I’m not entirely convinced that it’s going to be so easy to monetize its tremendous user base and consequently I’ve never bought shares. But I also recognize the fact that with more than 1 billion users, this company has a plethora of data and every incentive in the world to figure out how best to use it. But the bottom line is that if I ever decide to buy shares of Facebook, it’s going to be because I’ve done my homework and because it’s a business that I am content to be an owner of for the next three to five years — or even longer. I will use my greatest advantage — time — facand then move forward. I recommend these disgruntled Facebook shareholders do the same.

The article Dear Disgruntled Facebook Investors: Get a Clue originally appeared on Fool.com and is written by Jason Moser.

Jason Moser has no position in any stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool recommends Facebook and Google. The Motley Fool owns shares of Facebook and Google.

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