Afraid when the price falls, afraid when it rises
In 1999 a major American financial magazine asked on its cover: "Warren, what's wrong with you?" His stock had just lost half its value while the whole market was getting richer by the day. Twenty years later people understood: the mistake was not his. It belonged to those who only looked at the price.
Fear runs in both directions
Most investors think fear only arrives when a stock falls. It does not.
When the price drops we fear losing more, and sell to "cut losses". That is the fear everybody sees.
But there is a second, quieter fear: when the price rises sharply and we do not really understand the business, we fear losing the gain we have, and sell to "take profit". Or when our stock goes sideways while the crowd makes money elsewhere, we fear being left behind, and give up.
Both fears come from the same habit: anchoring to price rather than to the value of the business. Price is a number flickering on a screen every second. Value is the cash a business produces over years. Look only at the first and you will sell at the wrong moment, almost certainly.
And there is no cleaner example than Warren Buffett's own stock.
Berkshire: four tests of nerve
From 1965 to 2024, Berkshire Hathaway stock compounded at about 19.9% a year against 10.4% for the S&P 500. It sounds like a straight line up. In fact that road passed through four occasions when the stock lost roughly half its value.
1973–1975. The American market fell hard. Berkshire went from over $90 to around $40, down roughly 56%. At the same time one of Berkshire's holdings, the Washington Post, was marked down 25%, then another 20% the following year, while the business's value kept rising. Anyone selling on price missed a position that later returned many times over.
1987. Black Monday in October was a one-day test of nerve.
1998–2000. This is the most important one, because the fear arose not from a bad business. The dot-com bubble peaked, everyone was getting rich on internet stocks. Buffett refused to buy what he did not understand, and Berkshire was left behind: from over $80,000 to around $40,000, more than 50% down, while the market kept rising. The press openly mocked him as obsolete. Then the bubble burst, and whoever sold Berkshire out of embarrassment had sold exactly at the bottom.
2007–2009. Class A shares peaked around $151,000 in late 2007, then fell to around $70,000 by March 2009, the deepest drawdown in Berkshire's history at roughly 54%, and it took nearly four years to recover.
Four times. Four chances to panic and sell. But here is the figure worth taping to your screen: measured from 1965, Berkshire stock could fall 99% and still have beaten the S&P 500. Hearing this, Buffett replied: "Ben Graham would be proud. But don't try that arithmetic again."
The sentence containing the whole lesson is his own: if you cannot watch your holdings fall 50% without panicking, you should not be in the stock market.
Anyone who sold Berkshire at any point in those four episodes, out of fear the price would fall further or fear of being left behind, locked in a loss or an undercooked gain and watched the people who sat still carry on.
Seven other witnesses
You might think Berkshire is the exception. It is not.
Amazon fell 94% between 1999 and 2001, from $107 to $6. Before that collapse came the opposite fear: after a nearly 2,600% rise, many sold because it was "too expensive" or "a bubble". Those who held through both fears watched the stock rise roughly 11,900% since its 1997 listing.
Apple came close to bankruptcy in 1996, and its worst drawdown reached 82%. Those who watched the price sold out. Those who understood a business being rebuilt held, and the stock has risen more than 28,000% this century alone.
Tesla is a double example. It lost 74% from its late-2021 high to early 2023, and was called "too expensive" for years, prompting countless people to sell too early. Yet it has recovered from every 50%-plus drawdown in its history and delivered total returns of roughly 23,000% since listing in 2010.
Monster Beverage is the cruellest proof that holding even the best stock is torture if you only watch the price. It is one of the best stocks of the past thirty years, up hundreds of thousands of per cent. And yet it traded below its previous high on 94% of days, suffered four drawdowns of 50% or more, and lost over three-quarters of its value once. On the road to making big money, you spend a great deal of time watching yourself lose big money.
Netflix shows the gap between price and value most clearly. In 2011, after the clumsy "Qwikster" affair, the stock fell about 80% in a few months. But look at the business: paying subscribers rose that same year, from 21 million to nearly 24 million. The price halved repeatedly while customers kept increasing. Those anchored to price sold; those anchored to subscriber numbers held, and Netflix was the best stock of the 2010s.
And here is the fact that closes the argument: among the twenty best American stocks of 1985–2024, the average maximum drawdown was 72%. Not one exception. The biggest rewards always come with the biggest fear.
GAS: a mirror right there on HOSE
All those examples are American. What about Vietnam? Look at GAS, PetroVietnam Gas.
GAS listed on HOSE in May 2012 at a reference price of 36,000 dong. By 2014 it was the first Vietnamese business to reach a $10 billion market capitalisation and the largest stock on the market.
Then the oil storm came. The market-share war between OPEC and American shale drove oil from $110 to a $30 floor. GAS was dumped: it fell nearly 47% in 2014 alone, then followed oil down to a record low of 23,600 in January 2016, around 70% off its highs. Anyone watching only the oil price and the screen had cut their losses at that bottom.
But look at the business and the story is completely different. GAS has a monopoly on gas infrastructure, more than 70% of the dry gas market and nearly all of the domestic LPG market. By the end of 2023 the company held a huge cash and deposit balance of nearly 41,000 billion dong, a cushion Hetty Green would have nodded at. That cushion explains why, in the COVID-19 shock of 2020, when aviation and tourism collapsed, GAS fell only about 3% for the year: large cash balances and a steady cash dividend anchored investor sentiment.
Whoever bought at the 2016 bottom, precisely the point of maximum pessimism John Templeton hunted for, and whoever held through the storm, was paid: GAS made new highs when the Russia–Ukraine energy crisis broke in 2022, and reached an all-time high of 131,500 in early March 2026, many times the 2016 low and far above the listing price, before counting more than a decade of dividends.
The same stock, two opposite outcomes. The only difference: one person anchored to the oil price and the screen, the other to the business.
Why the screen deceives you
Why is watching the price so dangerous? Because the human brain feels a loss about twice as intensely as it feels an equivalent gain. When the screen is red that pain is amplified every second, and selling is the fastest way to stop it. That is not an investment decision; it is a survival reflex.
Buffett has a memorable comparison. Imagine you buy a field. Nobody stands at the fence shouting a price for it every second. You only know how much rice it yields each season, and so you hold it through bad years. Stocks are different: a flashing screen quotes a "price" continuously, turning a business owner into a gambler watching a scoreboard.
Price is the crowd's opinion on one day. Value is the business's truth over years. As we wrote in buying a house, a stock, any asset is fundamentally the same: you do not sell the house you live in because someone offered a low price today. Stocks are no different. The screen is not your friend. It is the illness.
The 5% anchor: why bond buyers hold on
In Vietnam there is one group of investors who almost never panic: buyers of 10-year government bonds yielding about 5% a year.
Why? Because they do not look at a "price" every day. They anchor to cash flow: interest each year, principal at maturity. They know exactly what they own, so a flickering number does not make them sell.
That is precisely the mindset an equity investor needs to borrow. The question is not "what is the price today?" but "does this business sustainably produce cash flow above 5%?" If it does, as GAS does with its monopoly position and steady dividend, then 50% drawdowns are noise, not signal. GAS's dividend stream plays exactly the role bond interest plays for a bondholder: it is the rope that lets you sit still through a storm.
This is also how value investing absolutely can be applied in Vietnam, where individual investors dominate turnover and therefore produce collective panics, which are opportunities, more often than any developed market.
The QuietVC lesson
Every great stock forces its holders through drawdowns that make them want to sell. Berkshire fell 50% four times. Amazon lost 94%. GAS lost 70%. That is not a rare accident; it is the price of the ticket on the long-term train.
The difference between those who get rich and those who lose money is not that they avoided those falls. Nobody avoids them. It is what they anchored to when the fall came.
Those anchored to price see a reason to sell: "it's going bankrupt", "its time is over", "the bubble popped". Those anchored to value see the same price as an opportunity, or simply see no reason to sell a good business because the crowd is afraid.
Turn the screen down. Ask about cash flow, not price. And remember: what makes you poorer is rarely the drawdown. It is the decision to sell during it.
Silent discipline. Compound value.