Earlier this month we revealed 5 ASX stocks that professional investors regretted, either for losing money or missing out on gains.

It reminded everyone that investing, even for those who do it for a living, never has a 100% win rate.

"To be perfectly honest, we target getting 60% of our decisions correct," Sage Capital portfolio manager Sean Fenton told The Motley Fool.

"If you don't do the hard accounting and actually track your investment decisions and work out your wins and losses, people tend to overestimate their skill. But we do do that — and if we can get 60% of our investment decisions right, it means we're absolutely knocking it out of the park."

So to counter that friend who brags about his new-found riches, here are stories of 6 more ASX shares that fund managers regretted:

Temple & Webster Group Ltd (ASX: TPW)

Online retailers did very well out of the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic. 

People around the world stayed bunkered down and ordered homewares remotely to make their lives more comfortable.

Sage Capital portfolio manager Kelli Meagher regretted not buying into Temple & Webster, with its shares as low as $2.05 last year. They are trading for $10.16 early Thursday afternoon.

"I regret how conservative I was with my valuation discipline, I suppose, when it came to pure online retail stocks when they first started moving last year," she told Ask A Fund Manager.

"And they've gone up, doubled and tripled, I saw that I'd missed the opportunity – and they just kept going. So there's definitely some remorse from sitting on the sidelines there."

Challenger Ltd (ASX: CGF)

Investment company Challenger has frustrated many shareholders over the last few years.

Trading at $5.34 Thursday afternoon, the stock is more than 38% down on 5 years ago.

U Ethical portfolio manager Jon Fernie admitted defeat.

"The one stock retreat where we got the timing wrong was investing into Challenger several years ago when we thought that interest rates were going to move higher. We also thought that there were going to be regulatory changes that would drive underlying demand for annuities," he told Ask A Fund Manager. 

"Unfortunately, both those things didn't happen. And that led to us ultimately exiting the stock at a lower level. So that was probably one investment decision that we regretted."

Nike Inc (NYSE: NKE) and Lululemon Athletica Inc (NASDAQ: LULU)

For Forager research analyst Chloe Stokes, she wished she was better prepared when markets nosedived in March 2020.

"We saw brilliant companies like Nike and Lululemon down more than 30% in a couple of days," she told Ask A Fund Manager.

"Those stocks would have been excellent investments at market prices, but because I never thought they were cheap enough to invest any time into, I didn't have a thesis ready."

Nike is up almost 30% in the past 12 months, while Lululemon shares have risen 19.2%.

The big lesson for Stokes was that investors, whether professional or amateur, need to have a 'hit list' ready for price dips.

"It might seem like a waste of time, but you never know when the opportunity could come along to own a high-quality business at a more than reasonable price," she said.

"I wouldn't want to miss out on owning some of my favourite businesses if the opportunity presents itself again."

Zoom Video Communications Inc (NASDAQ: ZM)

If ever there was a COVID beneficiary, the video conferencing company that became a verb is it.

Zoom shares have risen about 460% since the start of 2020 when no one was thinking twice about going into the office 5 days a week.

Spaceship portfolio manager Jason Sedawie regretted not getting a piece of that action.

"It's always what you don't buy that hurts you because they can be the potential multi-baggers," he told Ask A Fund Manager.

"Whenever I'm on a Zoom call or Google Meet, I just get reminded of that company."

The video tech provider surprised Sedawie in the way it rose above hot competition from deeper-pocketed rivals.

"We did know about it, but it wasn't something we were really excited about because everyone used Microsoft Teams, Google Hangouts," he said.

"They were a business service that schools and consumers just all of a sudden knew. So they went from 10 million daily meeting participants to 300 million a couple of months later. Just how they scaled and executed and pivoted – I just have a lot of respect."

Tripadvisor Inc (NASDAQ: TRIP)

Hyperion Asset Management lead portfolio manager Jason Orthman remembers buying Tripadvisor shares thinking the business could disrupt traditional booking engines.

"Our research didn't pick up how sticky consumer behaviour was and how strong the competitive offerings were," he told Ask A Fund Manager.

"It took us about 2 quarters to realise our research was incorrect, and we exited. And that saved our investors a lot of money. We lost money on that investment, but we didn't experience the significant downside that those that have held onto that business had."

Tripadvisor stocks have lost more than 34% over the past 5 years.

But there was a final twist to rub salt into the wound.

Stocks for Tripadvisor rival Booking Holdings Inc (NASDAQ: BKNG) have surged almost 83% in the last half-decade.

"We compounded that error, not only buying Tripadvisor, but selling out of Priceline, which is now called Booking Holdings."

The post 6 more shares that haunt fund managers appeared first on The Motley Fool Australia.

Ask A Fund Manager

The Motley Fool chats with fund managers so that you can get an insight into how the professionals think. In part 1 of our interview, Hyperion Asset Management lead portfolio manager Jason Orthman explained why Tesla shares are still cheap. Now in part 2, he tells us the ASX stock purchase that he's most proud of and the travel company that bit him.

MF: If the market closed tomorrow for 5 years, which stock would you want to hold?

JO: It'd be easy to say Tesla Inc (NASDAQ: TSLA), but I'm going to go with Amazon.com Inc (NASDAQ: AMZN). Just to have something different. 

We really like its culture in terms of how relentless they are, how they continually want to improve their product, improve their offering, focused on the consumer continually. It's very hard to compete against. 

There's a lot of optionality in that business. It's still very early, if you think of the transition to digital advertising, the transition to cloud [computing], the transition from physical retail into e-commerce. They're all multi-trillion dollar opportunities. And Amazon's still really early in it, despite its dominance. 

[Regarding] the regulatory issues… our research suggests the risks around that are actually relatively low. So something like Amazon, if you woke up in 5 years' time, I think you'd do pretty well.

MF: What did you think of Jeff Bezos stepping down as chief executive?

JO: The fact that he'd been driving that business for 20, 25 years means the culture's really embedded. Even if you go and visit an outpost, [like] some of their offices here in Australia, that same culture and core values are embedded as they would be in the head office in Seattle. Being founder-led for all that period of time, he really embedded those values in the business. 

The business is now bigger than Jeff Bezos, and he'd been stepping back from day-to-day management for a number of years. So that focus on, again, the product, the consumer, innovation, that's going to continue on as is. 

We took that in its stride. If it happened 10 years earlier, that would've been a concern. But happening now, I think they'd be absolutely fine.

MF: Have you held Amazon for a long time?

JO: The fund will be 7 years [old] on the 1st of June. And it's been in that fund for most of that journey, not from day one, but for most of that journey. We would've held that comfortably over 5 years.

Looking back

MF: Which stock are you most proud of from a past purchase?

JO: Tesla's a really good one. There wasn't a lot of need for us to make that investment. As I said, we watched that for 5 years before we purchased it. 

The amount of controversy, misinformation, level of shorting on that stock was extreme. So to go ahead and still purchase that and seek out 6 or 7 times [return] is pretty pleasing. 

Closer to home, Domino's Pizza Enterprises Ltd (ASX: DMP), [which] we still own in our Australian products, and we did own it in the global equities fund at one stage. 

It went through the mainstream media through 2017 – there were question marks over the sustainability of its business model. We believed that that was a false narrative – the underlying economics of that business was strong.

There was no need to have underpayments through that system. Franchising is a tough business, so you're always going to have pockets of that. But we believe that the underlying economics were there, the management team was really strong, and our market research suggested the system is really robust. 

So [we were proud] to buy that stock when there was a lot of negative media through the traditional papers and TV. As far as we're aware, we're the only large institutional fund manager that actually purchased stock through that period. 

And it's gone from $40 to over $100 today. We're pretty proud of that because it was a long consensus call and went against everything that was being spoken about in the market and the media.

MF: Is there a move that you regret from the past? For example, a missed opportunity or buying a stock at the wrong timing or price.

JO: Yeah, it was purchasing Tripadvisor Inc (NASDAQ: TRIP). We've put it down as one of the mistakes that we've made on this journey. 

Our research didn't pick up how sticky consumer behaviour was and how strong the competitive offerings were. And we compounded that error, not only buying Tripadvisor but selling out of Priceline, which is now called Booking Holdings Inc (NASDAQ: BKNG). 

We thought Tripadvisor could disrupt those traditional booking engines. It took us about two quarters to realise our research was incorrect, and we exited. And that saved our investors a lot of money. We lost money on that investment, but we didn't experience the significant downside that those that have held onto that business had. 

So there are some learnings we took out of it. But that experience with Tripadvisor was disappointing.

The post The stock that I'd hold for the next 5 years: fundie appeared first on The Motley Fool Australia.