‘Your Stock Doesn’t Know Your Name’: Wes Moss on Owning Too Much Apple, Google
A 45-year-old investor with a million dollars on the line and a third of it riding on three stocks asked Wes Moss how to escape. His answer starts with a mindset shift most investors resist making.
On the September 1 episode of The Clark Howard Podcast, a 45-year-old Florida state employee with roughly a million dollars invested asked how to unwind a concentrated bet: about a third of the portfolio sat in Alphabet (NASDAQ:GOOGL | GOOGL Price Prediction), Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL), and Shopify (NASDAQ:SHOP), with the Shopify shares carrying large capital gains in a taxable account. Wes Moss, who hosts the show’s Ask An Advisor segment, answered with a line worth pinning to the fridge:
You may know your stock’s name, but your stock doesn’t know your name. Your stock doesn’t care who you are. We get attached to these names like they know us. They don’t. We’ve got to always look at our portfolio as just a bucket of cash.
Moss is right, and the math behind that sentiment matters more the closer you are to needing the money. This is a position-sizing conversation about Apple, Alphabet, and Shopify and about right-sizing each holding for the portfolio’s role.
Why Your Biggest Winner Is Also Your Biggest Risk
Concentration risk is behavioral before it is financial. The largest position in a portfolio is almost always the position that grew the most, which is the one an investor is least willing to trim. Moss reframed this with a memorable question: if you were starting from cash today, would you want 50% of your holdings sitting in two companies? Very few people say yes.
Sequence risk sharpens the danger. A 30% drawdown in a single stock during your accumulation years is a paper cut. The same drawdown in the first five years of retirement, while you are also selling shares for income, permanently shrinks the portfolio’s ability to recover. (We walked through how to defend those opening years in a free guide: The First Five Years.) A concentrated winner delivers oversized returns on the way up and oversized damage on the way down.
What You Actually Own With Apple, Alphabet, and Shopify
Owning these three names individually on top of a broad index fund double-counts the exposure. For instance, in the SPDR S&P 500 ETF Trust (NYSEARCA:SPY), Apple already accounts for roughly 7% of assets, with Alphabet’s two share classes together adding another 5%. Invesco QQQ Trust (NASDAQ:QQQ) leans heavier still, with Apple near 7% and the combined Alphabet lines around 6%.
These three names carry very different risk profiles. Apple trades around $317 with a P/E of about 36. Alphabet, at roughly $336, carries a P/E close to 17 with a similar payout.
Shopify sits in a different risk bucket entirely. Shares were last seen near $147 with a P/E of 100, no dividend, and a beta of 2.59, meaning the stock has historically moved with more than twice the volatility of the broad market. Treating it as equivalent to a mega-cap dividend payer inside the same portfolio understates how much single-stock volatility a holder has taken on.
Moss’s Rule for Trimming a Moonshot
On the Shopify piece specifically, Moss offered the framework for cutting a big winner without regret:
Anytime you see a stock that’s up 4,000%, think about this: what’s the likelihood it’s going to be the biggest gainer in the market over the next five years? Pretty low probability. Moonshots usually hit the moon. They don’t keep going past the moon.
The 4,000% figure is Moss’s illustrative framing for how big winners tend to fade. The reasoning still holds. Yesterday’s best performer rarely repeats, and the odds of topping the market over another five-year run are slim.
Two Moves to Make This Week
- Run the bucket-of-cash test. Write down your current allocation and ask whether you would rebuild it from scratch today at those weights. Any position you would not repurchase at today’s price is a candidate for trimming.
- Trim inside retirement accounts first. Rebalancing inside a 401(k), IRA, or Roth generates zero capital gains tax. That is the escape hatch for investors frozen by the tax bill on a big taxable winner, and it is what Moss pointed the listener toward given the $80,000-per-year Roth conversion plan already in motion.
Your stock will not send flowers when you sell it, and it will not apologize when it drops 40%. Size the position to fit the portfolio you actually need.
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Trey has been an editor and author at 24/7 Wall St. for more than a decade, where he has published thousands of articles analyzing corporate earnings, dividend stocks, short interest, insider buying, private equity, and market trends. His comprehensive coverage spans the full spectrum of financial markets, from blue-chip stalwarts to emerging growth companies.
Beyond 24/7 Wall St., Trey has created and edited financial content for Benzinga and AOL's BloggingStocks, contributing additional hundreds of articles to the investment community. He previously oversaw the 24/7 Climate Insights site, managing editorial operations and content strategy, and currently oversees and creates content for My Investing News.
Trey's editorial expertise extends across multiple publishing environments. He served as production editor at Dearborn Financial Publishing and development editor at Kaplan, where he helped shape financial education materials. Earlier in his career, he worked as a writer-producer at SVE. His freelance editing portfolio includes work for prestigious clients such as Sage Publications, Rand McNally, the Institute for Supply Management, the American Library Association, Eggplant Literary Productions, and Spiegel.
Outside of financial journalism, Trey writes fiction and has been an active member of the writing community for years, overseeing a long-running critique group and moderating workshop sessions at regional conventions. He lives with his family in an old house in the Midwest.
