This is the sentence most investors intellectually accept and behaviorally fail. Mayer is not describing a theoretical scenario. His research shows that virtually every stock that became a 100-bagger passed through one or more periods of 50% or greater drawdown along the way. The price charts of Amazon, Monster Beverage, and Booking Holdings all contain deep chasms that looked, at the time, like potential terminal declines.

The investors who captured the full multiple were not those who predicted when the bottom was in. They were those who held through it without selling, often because they had done enough fundamental work on the business to remain confident in its long-term prospects even as the market price suggested disaster.

Mayer's point has two components. First, the drawdowns are not a bug of 100-bagger investing — they are a feature that most investors refuse to tolerate, which is exactly why the eventual returns are so extraordinary. If holding a future 100-bagger were comfortable, competition for those shares would eliminate the return. The pain is the price of the prize.

Second, surviving the drawdowns requires prior preparation: position sizing that doesn't force a sale when the price falls, conviction built through research rather than borrowed from a newsletter, and a written investment thesis that can be re-read during the worst moments to separate business reality from price noise. Mayer's book is, in large part, a manual for building that preparation.

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