On a recent episode of Earn Your Leisure titled “The #1 Investing Mistake Keeping You Broke,” co-host E delivered a blunt diagnosis for retail investors: stop trading the stocks you should be holding. “The ones that are leading now will lead,” he said, warning that top companies could compound 4,000% or 5,000% over five or six years while impatient traders walk away with 200% profits that get “blown on a car or a vacation or somebody who doesn’t love you.”
His example: an investor who put $100,000 into NVIDIA in 2023 and doubled their money, then exited. The numbers since suggest that decision was costly.
NVIDIA: The Trade That Kept Paying
NVIDIA (NASDAQ:NVDA | NVDA Price Prediction) has returned 1,454.69% since January 3, 2023, and 1,484.53% over five years. The fundamentals back the run. Q4 FY2026 revenue hit $68.13 billion, up 73.2% year over year, with EPS of $1.62 versus a $1.52 estimate. Full-year FY2026 revenue reached $215.94 billion with $96.58 billion in free cash flow. CEO Jensen Huang told investors “the agentic AI inflection point has arrived” in the Q4 release.
AMD: The Other AI Compounder
Advanced Micro Devices (NASDAQ:AMD) is up 259.3% over the past year and 96.58% year to date. Q1 2026 revenue came in at $10.25 billion, up 37.9% YoY, with Data Center growing 57% to $5.78 billion. CEO Lisa Su flagged that “Customer engagement around MI450 Series and Helios is strengthening, with leading customer forecasts exceeding our initial expectations.” The Meta deal alone covers up to 6 gigawatts of Instinct GPUs.
Eli Lilly: The GLP-1 Volume Story
Eli Lilly (NYSE:LLY) has returned 427% over five years. Q1 2026 revenue jumped 55.5% to $19.80 billion, with Mounjaro at $8.66 billion (up 125%) and Zepbound at $4.16 billion (up 80%). EPS of $8.55 crushed the $6.79 consensus. Management raised full-year guidance to $82.0 to $85.0 billion in revenue. Analysts carry an average target of $1,210 on the stock.
The Real Cost of Early Exits
Sean Duffy hammered the same point with a fresh example: a company that IPO’d in February 2025 at $1.95 has jumped to $12.89, a 3,400% gain that listeners watched develop “week after week” without acting. E framed the behavioral trap directly: it is “crazy as hell” to “trade an asset to then spend it on a liability.” Reddit threads suggest the pain is real. One viral r/wallstreetbets post celebrated “AMD +21k % – 10 Years of Diamond Hands”, while another anxious holder posted “I got into AMD at ~$60 per share and now have zero strategy for it.” Patience, in each of these three names, has done the heavy lifting.
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