To those holding big banks

Not financial advice

Buying big banks make sense (not financial advice) or at least it used to be popular.

Not only because of the well-known fundamentals — the earnings quality, the governance, the balance sheet — but let’s be honest. It is also because of the social angle.

There’s that subtle validation that comes from owning what every serious/respectable person around you owns. A lot of people I admire ended up with portfolios genuinely concentrated in BBCA, BBRI, BMRI.

To add, you can see that the damn thing is real. You could see bank branches, office towers bearing their names, and ATMs that are virtually everywhere across Indonesia. Even in cities that you have probably never even heard of, like Tambolaka, you see a Bank Rakyat Indonesia.

Mind you the behavior to buy and hold big banks is not easy. You need discipline to set aside your monthly income, month after month, into stocks whose price action is nowhere near as exciting as crypto or the smaller penny stocks that dominate your feed.

You need patience.

You need a certain degree of deafness to shield you from the loud noises of people screaming

“Gua cuan x% beli y”

”I am profitable x% because I bought y”

For years.

You cannot even begin to start counting in your head: how much money making opportunities have I missed because I refuse to listen to the guy next to me talking about these other sexy stocks.

Even worse is the recent drawdown — minus 30 to minus 40 percent from the all-time highs. Portfolios filled almost entirely with big banks. A thing that was assumed to be the prudent action, the prudent decision, turns out to be “blatantly wrong” within the span of less than a year.

All the hard work of slowly saving into a sizeable investment account — gone in a matter of months.

If that’s not painful, I don’t know what is.

Because it must be really difficult to do the prudent thing for so many years and get a less-than-ideal result. It almost feels like a fuck you in the face. From the market, — fuck you, you were supposed to be timing this, trading it, running speculative plays to generate superior returns. Or — fuck you, you should have just stayed in time deposits and risk-free rates.

And if you tried to go one step braver than the risk-free rate — if you bought the bonds of shadow banks offering a couple of extra percent — those shadow banks tend to go under. Another huge risk on your capital you never saw coming.

Painful stuff.

But strangely, watching this has led me to a realization about how I look at failure.

As a kid I was terrified of it. I’ve been getting scholarships, prestigious jobs, venture capital backing, whatever. But underneath all that, I also encountered plenty of failure.

The first time I failed badly was my SAT in high school. I cried for an entire evening because score came back under 2,000. I was so afraid I would end up at a bad university, so afraid I wouldn’t get scholarships. Disappointed in myself.

That night I told myself: I don’t want to fail anymore.

Obviously I didn’t learn anything back then.

A couple of years before we started Recompound, I had a co-founder split. Not catastrophic, but tough. It drained my savings. The opportunity cost was a seat at a prestigious bank. I was questioning everything — what am I doing.

I thought those two events taught me something. They didn’t. Not really. I still carried hesitancy toward failure.

The lesson only arrived when I started feeling it in other people.

Watching many disciplined people fail after doing the right thing. After trying to be a good person. After trying to be a fucking disciplined person who sets aside their monthly wages to plan their future properly, trusting in so-called safe instruments.

And here’s the strange part.

The ones who grow the most from this aren’t the ones who avoid failure — they’re the ones who refuse to resign to it. They suddenly care about why they invested in a stock. They care about the analysis behind it. They care about why a company is actually undervalued — not just whether a more financially savvy person said it was undervalued.

They stop accepting the prescription. They want to verify. They want to understand with their own common sense that a company is genuinely cheap — not take someone’s word for it.

That move — from “this is good because everyone says so” to “this is good because I understand the mechanism” — is a huge, huge shift. It’s the shift that lets people stay invested for the long term.

That’s when I really realise that the biggest growth in a person comes from their biggest failure.

If big banks had never corrected, I imagine these same people would still be doing the same thing, over and over. Maybe the drawdown happened for a reason — to upgrade the critical minds of the general population. To separate the people who want to actively improve from the people who quietly resign to fate.

So wherever you are, if you’re in the middle of this — this phenomenon, this so-called failure — I hope you know which side you want to be on.

I hope you choose growth over stagnation.

Last I checked I don’t think we can time travel and reverse decisions we made in the past. The only thing we can do is improve the next one. And maybe continue to have faith that the next fruit is better because of what this one costs.

If you don’t know who talk to about this, you can always give us a call.

Cheers.