Isn’t that the best headline, “Mistakes Were Made?” I love how it implies that we’re moving on, and it was nobody’s fault — pretty much every US President since Reagan has used that phrase when faced with a screwup or a scandal, (we’ve long since left the days of Harry Truman’s “the buck stops here” in our political history), and I’m sure every CEO has used a similar phrase from time to time. William Safire even gave it an entry in his Political Dictionary, calling it a past exonerative and defining it as “A passive-evasive way of acknowledging error while distancing the speaker from responsibility for it.”

Sadly, I can’t use a past exonerative with a straight face here. I was the one that made this particular mistake, it didn’t make itself… but let me go into a little more detail as I talk about why I first liked and invested in the little gambling software company GAN (GAN)… and how I belatedly realized the mistakes I made along the way, and sold this week.

I’ve made several mistakes in my investing over the past year, to be clear, largely from getting caught up in being a little bit too accepting of the crazy-high valuations of some of the best growth stocks (I’m sure I’ll write more about those in future pieces — Sea Limited (SE) is the one that sticks in my craw right now, with its solid growth but disappointing margins, which is why I’ve not been willing to set a “buy below” price for the shares so far this year), and I will definitely make more mistakes in the future, that’s an integral part of the job. But this mistake is more company-specific, and I’m hoping it will teach us a little something.

GAN (GAN) finally reported its 2021 earnings this week, and this has been one of the growth stocks where I’ve been quite out of sync with market sentiment for a while — I thought that they were building something profitable and appealing when I first bought shares, about two years ago, and for a brief while they got almost as much attention as the “brand name” sports betting stocks like DraftKings (DKNG), and since that first wild summer they’ve been through two significant periods of disruption in less than two years as a US-listed company (first when they lost some of the ...