Why Kevin O'Leary Says You Will 'Never' Get Investing Right Every Time

You can't beat yourself up every time you make a bad call.

It's a scenario that's played out for the best of us. You bought a stock for $100 a share you were convinced had solid growth potential, and due to a combination of stock market volatility and poor earnings, those shares are now only worth $50 apiece. And since you bought 20 of them, you're now sitting on a $1,000 loss in your brokerage account.

Rest assured that this is a situation even the most seasoned investors have encountered. So you shouldn't get down on yourself if you made a bad call on a specific stock or asset. 

Don't expect a 100% success rate

Maybe you're new to investing. Or maybe you've been doing it for 20 years. No matter which end of the spectrum you fall on, you should know that you're probably going to make some mistakes when it comes to choosing assets to invest in. And that's perfectly okay. 

In fact, Shark Tank personality Kevin O'Leary will be the first person to tell you that if you make a bad call in your portfolio, you're in good company. In a recent tweet, he wrote, "As an investor, you will never get it right every time. You will make some mistakes. Sometimes big ones...The key is to learn from them so you don't repeat. Over time experience will get you to a place where you make more good investments than bad."

That's really solid advice. The more you research stocks and invest in them, the easier it will become to spot red flags and avoid bad calls. But even once you reach that point, you're still not always going to pick winners for your portfolio. And it's important that you reconcile that in your head so you don't cause yourself unnecessary grief.

Diversifying can help

The more you branch out in your portfolio, the easier it becomes to recover from a bad investment -- or not have it hurt you so much in the first place. Let's say you decide to put money into crypto and the value of your digital currencies completely tanks. If crypto comprises 50% of your portfolio, you could be looking at serious losses. But if it's only 15%, the hit won't be as hard. 

The same applies to individual stocks. It's a good idea to own a few dozen stocks across a range of industries. That way, if a specific company you've bought does poorly, or a certain sector of the market plummets, your losses will be minimized. 

Or, to put it another way, if the total value of your investment portfolio is $20,000, you shouldn't own $10,000 in shares of the same company. That could mean taking a really bad loss if that company sorely underperforms and its share price plunges. 

Of course, diversifying your portfolio won't completely take away the sting of an investment gone wrong. But remember, getting things wrong is par for the course. And the longer you invest, the more spread out those bad calls are likely to become.