Lessons From a Failed Investment

Updated from 7:03 a.m. EDT

By Guest Columnist Chris Fernandez of PeakStocks.com

It's been about two months now since I advocated selling your full position, if you had one, in SoundBite Communications(SDBT Quote - Cramer on SDBT - Stock Picks), a provider of on-demand customer contact solutions.

In those couple of months, I've had time to reflect upon what went wrong with my investment thesis in SoundBite, what I learned from the debacle, and how I can apply those lessons going forward.

My hope is that by sharing these insights with you, you can also strengthen your investing parameters and better understand what goes into my criteria for selecting companies for inclusion into the PeakStocks.com portfolio.

When I bought it, SoundBite was a cheap company, with great growth prospects in a small niche field. It had recently come public, and I had watched its stock price steadily decline, in spite of its seemingly impressive and improving fundamentals and wonderful business model.

So I did some digging around.

What I found out should have given me pause, but I was too focused and blinded by the "cheap" valuation and the fact that in its only quarter as a public company, SoundBite beat and raised guidance to such a degree as to seem like an unbelievably cheap stock compared with any comparables available at the time.

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